A little operation on a messy chicken bottom

My favourite brown shaver hen lays the most enormous eggs. A couple of weeks ago she spent far too long in the nest box. By mid-afternoon I got around to investigating, and found her still in there, sitting on a foul mixture of diarrhoea and egg yolk and white. 

Reader, meet One-Wattle*, who had a troubled rear end.

At times like this, bravery is required. One must be intrepid and shoulder responsibility, even if one wants to run away from it because she has no idea what to do or what she might find.

I turned her upside down and saw a little white thing poking out of her bottom. This looked like the soft, empty shell of an egg - and indeed I'd been finding a lot of broken eggs in the nest box, and collecting eggs with very pale, fragile shells. I now understood they were hers, and that she was having trouble forming shells for her big, regular eggs. 

Also poking out was a bit of her innards - she'd been straining so hard to get rid of that irritating shell that she'd very slightly turned herself inside out, and the inside bit was a gleaming, bright red.

I began to pull out the egg shell, and noticed that this turned her inside out even more. Having given birth, I know the value of slow pushing. Give the body a bit more time, and it yields. So I just pulled a bit more slowly and gently.

The eggshell I removed

Out came the flaccid, soft, empty eggshell. Instantly the hen's bottom returned to normal, the bright pink inside-out bit returning to where it belonged, and all visible bits of the cloaca entrance returning to a normal pale pink. She must have felt hugely relieved. 

I popped her back into the cleaned-up nest box to recover. Half an hour later she was completely back to normal, running with her pals. A successful nursing mission!

I haven't had to to a lot of chicken nursing, having kept my birds fairly healthy, but you can read about another instance here (part 1) and here (the more tragic part 2).

*I call her One-Wattle, because only one of them developed into anything when she hit puberty. It's a particularly pendulous wattle, as if to make up for the other runty one.

One-Wattle's eggs are in the back row.

A giant One-Wattle egg. It looks like a double-yolker,
but always contains one yolk and excess egg white.

Chicken treats: sunflower seeds and green vegetable bugs

One of the greatest things about having chickens is watching them eating your unwanted waste products and being delighted about it. Cockroaches, snails... now there is even a bright side to finding pests.

At the moment our sunflowers are stunning, and the honeybees and bumblebees are feasting. Soon the flower heads will wilt and dry out, and I'll hang the heads over the chicken run. The seeds will drop out, and the chickens will gobble them with glee.

Not all sunflowers have useful seeds, though. Our neighbours have grown 'Lion's Mane' sunflowers this year, and the seeds look normal, but they are just empty shells! I wish I could tell you which cultivars are suitable. Ours have self seeded for years, so I no longer know what they're called.

I'd feel fairly confident though, with these seeds from Koanga gardens (out of stock at the time of writing, but I think they will have more for early spring), or the Giant Russian sunflower from anywhere.

I've thought about growing them so they naturally hang over the chicken run, and this year I planted some for that purpose. Sadly my fencing wasn't secure enough, and the chickens escaped and destroyed the seedlings.

Another treat that's in season at the moment is green vegetable bugs, also called shield bugs or, in our house, stink bugs, because they squirt out a stinky substance onto your hands when you capture them. Having accidentally bitten into one years ago, I can testify that they taste as bad as they smell. Why, then, do chickens love them so much? I have no idea.

Our three hens get very excited when we are to have beans for dinner. This requires one of us to go near our runner beans, home of the stink bugs. They know that soon we'll be delivering lots of little green packages of stunk-up goodness to their greedy beaks.

Their squawky demands spur me on to collect every green stink bug I can find. This is also good for the garden, because there are far fewer bugs around than there would be otherwise. It does take a bit of time, though.

For those new to stink bug capturing, I recommend putting one hand underneath whatever the bug's on - say a tomato - and gently tapping or shaking the tomato. The stink bug survival mechanism is to drop to the ground, and your hand will intercept it.

Gardening note: Scarlet runners attract stink bugs like mad, which is a good reason not to grow them. We've grown mainly Cobra runners this year, and they are similarly prolific and even more delicious than the scarlet runners - plus the bugs don't seem to like them. However, a few scarlet runners have popped up also (they're perennial), and have become a stink bug hang-out zone, and as usual they've spread to our tomatoes and are sucking the goodness out of them. But not as much as they would be if we had no chickens egging us on to deliver them the goods.