Today's post was going to centre around my new (and final) Black Rabbit photography book (vol III) as I have published it last week. You can get a sneak preview on the large tab at the foot of this home page.
Unfortunately though, as those of you who visit my facebook page will know, my favourite hen of our two, "Cutlery", has taken a severe turn for the worse this week and I don't think she'll be with us for much longer -if she doesn't die in the next two days (naturally) I have a vets appointment for tuesday evening -and the kindest thing then would be to have her destroyed humanely I feel.
If anyone reading this knows our hens ("Couven" and "Cutlery"), you'll know that they have been a wonderful addition to the garden at Swift Half over the past 20 months or so - an absolute joy for me - and a real sense of peace when I return home from work. They are friendly, inquisitive, relatively intelligent birds -really fun to be around.
We got them from a breeder in Hook Norton last spring - and whilst training them to eat their pellets, cleaning them out, worming them, giving them insecticide treatments, vaselining their combs and wattles last winter and protecting them from our foxes has been trying at times, they've repaid our efforts a thousandfold times over.
Cutlery was the first to do everything. The first to come out the stange coop on day one in our garden, the first to lay, the first to jump on my lap when I hand fed them, the first to allow us to pick them up, the first to jump on my shoulder, or foot or even head!
She has always been a bit errr.... "special" though. Her comb and wattles never really developed, she went off laying pretty quickly - then laid un-shelled and /or broken eggs. Her poos have never been as well-formed as her sisters and she's been slower in the races for months - in fact she only ever won one race (which I didn't film unfortunately).
She has had very sloppy poos for a few months now, which meant that the wonderfully fluffy ginger feathers below her vent have been permanently caked in faeces. You wash her and she immediately poos down herself again - very disconcerting.
That all said, up until the middle of this week, I had no worries about her, other than the normal "Cutlery worries" - dirty bum, bit slow etc... Last weekend she helped Anna and her sister with the weeding in the rear (rear) garden and up until wednesday of this week, she was walking around quite content, able to jump up onto ledges etc...
But from wednesday onwards, she started to fail, quite badly. She weighs virtually nothing, is not preening, not eating hardly anything (unless we hand feed her norty treats) and cannot even really walk properly. I had her inside yesterday and as I type this she's in a box beside me, still, with her head under her wing.
Its hearbreaking to be fair, even though she is "only a chicken". I've racked my brains trying to work out whether I've done something wrong - but I honestly don't think I have. They have been fed layer pellets as a staple, with the odd treat here and there, they have had the run of the huge gardens very often (most days for hours and hours). They have had fresh water with tonic (apple cider vinegar), insecticide power (no mites) and have been wormed to schedule. Have they caught trich from the local wild birds? I doubt it -I've always been sure to keep the girls and wild birds fed and watered separately - in fact I got so concerned that people in the locality were not cleaning their bird feeders regularly (after I saw first hand (for the first time) what Trich does to garden birds, that I took all my bird feeders down and only fed the chickens. I still only feed tits, jays and woodpeckers - no finches or pigeons have anything to eat here. So I don't think its Trich, nor worms, nor mites. Do I think its EYP - Egg Yolk Peritonitis? Quite possibly, but we suspected this before with her and treated her accordingly, with vet medicine. She responded well.
So why is she on the way out then, after only 20 months? I have no idea, but as I've written, she has always been a little "fragile" - maybe all this effort with bad eggs, bad poos, no comb development etc.. has caught up with the poor girl. I don't think we could have done anything more for our girls - we got two and I think one was always just a "duff chicken". Couven on the other hand is racing around the garden still (even as I type) and is fighting fit.
What now? Well, I hope she dies in her "sleep", (or recovers of course) but if not, I think we'll probably have her destroyed on Tuesday. If that is the case, I will be very sad indeed and I will desparately miss my "special" hen.
If that does happen, Couven will be left on her own until we get some more hens (two we think) to join her. Chickens are social animals and should never be housed on their own. We are already thinking of getting two Columbian Blacktails to join Couven (who is a Warren or Bovan-Goldline depending on what breeder you buy from). As for names - well I can't call another hen "Cutlery" I'm afraid. Maybe we'll continue down the Baroque German route and have Pachelbel or Knobelsdorf, Schinkel or even Haltenberger?
I leave you with two photos of our girls - the first (Cutlery RHS looking "back) was taken on 17th May 2009 -the first day we had our girls and the second (Cutlery to the left, "in the lead") was taken on 12th October 2010 - the last photo I took of both girls.
Finally a video - from my youtube channel - of one of my girls races. Happier days. Good girl Cutters.
Sorry to hear this Doug
ReplyDeleteThanks pal. Not long for her now I think...
ReplyDelete