Another month of good egg output – of course it would be, given that we wormed the girls this month, ahead of moving them back into the LSA. The withholding period for the worming meds means that eggs are not fit for human consumption for a couple of weeks, so they have been piling up in the fridge. We figure it’s OK to cook them up and feed them back to the girls, so they’ve been doing alright out of it!

Until the 20th of the month Venus laid every day, so was looking odds on for the Golden Cloaca award. But she missed a couple of days and it looked like flaky-Venus was back. Frida was poised to overtake her, but Venus hung in there and made it to 25 eggs for the month – a winning total. Frida was second on 22, then Ella and Neroli on 19. Lily & Bessie squeezed them out as steadily as ever and ended up with 18 and 17 respectively.

At the other send of the scale, Poppy managed 13, which is actually amazingly good, considering her traumatic month. She came back in to lay after her travails on the 20th and laid 9 eggs in the last 11 days of the month. Claire continued her low output and ended up with just 10. A total of 143 eggs for the month, down just 4 on last month.

In December we can expect a drop in production – partly due to Murphy’s Law (because the eggs will be edible again in a few days) and partly because we expect a few more to go broody as the weather warms up, as well as them just losing steam a bit after laying steadily through spring.

Well, not quite. But I’m sure you can understand why it’s begun to feel that way.

So, an update. On Thursday morning (two days ago), Pauline, Veronika, apple puree and the combined efforts of the vet nurse staff of Hornby Vet Clinic had finally managed to get things moving in Poppy’s crop. Finally, after four days (give or take), her crop was actually going down in size between feedings, and she was good enough to come home (albeit with an A4 page of instructions). No solids yet, but a small portion of sloppy mash (made up with live yoghurt and apple sauce) three times a day, and Tetravet antibiotic powder in her water for the next ten days.

Oh god, now she knows where the food comes from …

She’s been installed in the big cage we bought for Frida’s convalescence. (We had hoped to be able to reclaim the living room coffee table by now, but evidently it isn’t to be … oh well. A house isn’t a home without a chicken indoors.) She’s eating well, looks absolutely normal, and – how shall I put it delicately – throughput is occurring on a regular basis. The hardest part is fending her off when you go to open the cage – she’s bored, and considers herself at least as human as we are. And why else do we have armpits, if not for her to burrow into?

One weird side effect of her convalescent diet – she occasionally does apple-smelling burps …

Poor Poppy. She’s doomed to be the centre of drama.

After about a month on various antibiotics, and with the trauma of having her wound tweezered at least once a day, we finally got to the point where she was able to come off the drugs and be left to finish healing on her own. On Thursday morning she went in for Veronika to put her under anesthetic and do a final debriding of the wound. As it happened, Veronika and Pauline both decided that the wound was nice and healthy, and that no further intervention should be needed – Poppy could come off her antibiotics, and no more wrestling every evening to clean out the wound!

A day or so before that, we’d noticed her making these strange, sideways movements with her head and neck. A bit like retching, but circular and sideways. She was bright and happy in every other way, so we just assumed it was the result of the ever more frenzied struggling during her daily mouth-cleaning. (She is one powerful girl, and on more than one occasion we were seriously worried that she was going to injure herself.) She’d been getting quite hard to get medication into – adept at leaving only those portions of food with meds in. Getting quite fussy too. So we were relieved when she came back into lay (first egg back Saturday), with the attendant vast increase in appetite (a non-laying hen needs around 30 g feed per day; a laying hen needs around 130 g per day).

We’d withheld food from her on Thursday morning in preparation for possible surgery. So she had a whole morning with an empty crop. Except … it wasn’t empty. There was a small but definite wad of food in there. (In theory, the crop should empty completely overnight.) As she’d not had to be anesthetised, we’d thought nothing of it – Poppy spends quite a lot of time eating over the course of the day, so that seemed within normal limits.

Come Sunday evening, her crop was huge. She was eating like a laying hen, and walking around with a lump the size of a tennis ball under her neck. It was fairly firm, and she was making her odd movements fairly frequently, but she was still eating with a great deal of gusto.

Yesterday morning came, and Poppy’s crop was still huge, and it was obvious that something was wrong. We had a go at (gently) trying to massage it, to help food pass, but it was only causing her discomfort. So we whisked her back in to the vets’ to see Pauline.

The technical name is Crop Impaction, or crop binding. There are lots of different causes – eating long grass (which ‘binds’ in the crop and can’t pass down) is a classic one. In Poppy’s case, it’s most likely a fungal problem resulting from her being on antibiotics for so long.

So yesterday Pauline repeatedly tried to flush Poppy’s crop with liquid, to help everything move through. As of an hour ago, they still hadn’t been able to get the mass to break up. She’s on anti-fungal agents as well as another antibiotic, and will be staying there for a second night. They’re going to try using apple puree – the fibre to help ‘flush’, plus the acidity of the apple to counteract any fungal canker.

The final resort is to operate – open her crop up and manually remove the contents. Which will leave her with a huge wound, and the need for more antibiotics …

Poor Poppy. All we can do is cross our fingers.

It’s taken a while, but (touch wood) Frida is now safely reintegrated back into the flock. We took our time to do it – lots of supervised interaction with a selected few other hens out of the lawn. Frida suddenly decided that she didn’t want to fight Neroli, and so that was sorted. (Frida now below Neroli in the pecking order, but above Lily. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.) Poppy and Ella were the main problem – still being extremely aggressive towards her, and meeting with enthusiastic reciprocal aggression from Frida. Sigh!

When Poppy and Ella both went broody within a day or so of each other, we decided to simplify our lives and put the broody girls in the nestless end run, and let Bessie and Frida go back to the main flock. And it worked! Frida marched straight into the WG house, and laid an egg in the nestbox as though she’d never been anywhere else. Had no trouble hopping up to the perch at night – we’d put plenty of bedding down on the floor so she could sleep down there if she wanted, but she didn’t. And was first out the door the next morning. There’s the odd peck from Neroli, but Frida just grumbles and gets on with things.

We had a suspicion that some of Ella and Poppy’s aggro might be due to their über-broody state. So they were each given small amounts of supervised lawn time with Frida (thus providing space to escape each other whilst building an association between being nice to each other and having good things – garden time – happen to them). And, sure enough, the day before Poppy laid her first egg back, she decided that she didn’t want to fight, and conceded superiority to Frida without so much as a hackle. (Hooray!) And today Ella spent a couple of hours outside with all the girls together, and was no more aggressive to Frida than she was to anyone else. (Huzzah!!) For the curious – yes, Ella laid her first egg back yesterday.

We’ll keep a close eye on things, and probably have Ella and Venus sleep away from the main flock for a few days yet – the biggest pressure, pecking-order-wise, is at bedtimes and first thing in the morning, when they’re in close confinement. But (fingers crossed) it’s looking good. Frida hops and skips at least as fast as the others run, and seems to be happy and pain-free.

I think we can call this one a victory.

It’s been another good month of laying, as you’d expect this time of year, although with some spring-broodiness starting to appear in the flock now. Venus was first to go, taking 11 days off in mid-month, but still managing 16 eggs in total. Ella and Poppy then went broody towards month-end, dropping them back to 15 and 18 eggs each respectively. But this has been easily the longest period of laying for Poppy without going broody.

Claire keeps popping them out every second day, pretty much like clockwork, and ended up with 14, while Bessie plodded on with 17. However the best performers were the three Dorking girls, with Lily on 20, Neroli on 22 and Frida taking Golden Cloaca Award this month with 25. (No sharing with Poppy and Venus like last month!) Here’s the graph:

So 147 eggs for the month – actually one better than last month. This means we have had consistent surpluses of eggs of late, so have been selling and bartering a few dozen here and there. It’s the girls way of contributing to their feed bill!

Ella’s eggs are the largest of our hens’, with an average size of 71 g (check out this page to see where that puts them on the standard commercial grades). They’re also the most indulgent to eat, as the yolk seems to make up a greater proportion of the egg than the other girls’ eggs, and the whites are thick and cling to the yolk. All this means they make a lovely fried or poached egg, and are our first choice when we’re having eggs that way.

But, as you’ll be aware if you’re a regular viewer of our monthly laying summaries, Ella isn’t the most productive of our girls. In fact in her first season laying (i.e her pullet year – supposedly their most productive time) she laid a total of 100 eggs. (Considering that her breed still holds the world record for most number of eggs laid by a single hen in a calendar year without artificial light – over 360 eggs – this is very definitely sub par.) Last season she did slightly bit better (108 eggs), and this season hasn’t been too bad (27) so far – although it still leaves her well behind the others, except Claire (who has an excuse). As a comparison, Frida (not from a high-laying breed) laid 205 in her first season.

Given that her peak production is in spring and early summer, we’ve come to the conclusion that Ella’s eggs are effectively a seasonal delicacy, like asparagus, whitebait, or Bluff oysters. So we tend to value them that way too, and they rarely get sold or bartered away! (Right now we’ve got seven stashed in the fridge, all laid in the last 10 days or so …)

Broody-Ella

And they’ll have to last for a while – she’s just gone broody. And she’s a determined and grumpy broody hen, so who knows how long before we get another egg!

Almost let this pass – one year ago today, Poppy hatched out the peebles! So happy 1st birthday Neroli, and to Princess/Pinkie, Sylvie/Cleo, and Rachel/Blue.

She spread her wings and fluffed them wide
and filled the nest from side to side.
“The urge has come upon me!” cried
Our noodle-brained Poppy.
“Get me some eggs to sit on,
and then bugger off!” said she.

(JP, with apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson )

Yes, it had to happen. In considerably less time than it took me to compose the above, Poppy has gone from normal to broody fluff-monster.

Oh well. We got 92 eggs from her before going broody this time. Which is 60 more than she’s managed before. And Venus has returned to laying … (conspiracy, anyone?!)

(With gratuitous chooks-roaming-the-garden photos.)

A good day in ChookeNZ-land! (Although you might want to skip the next paragraph if you’re of a queasy disposition.)

We took Poppy to Veronica today for another check. We’re winning! She’s on her third type of antibiotics (twice daily this time), with us cleaning the caseous pus out of her mouth every evening (which involves a towel, a pair of tweezers, cotton buds and lots of swearing – human and galline) and smearing the wound site with manuka honey ointment night and morning. And yesterday we got a huge lump – about half the size of my little-finger nail – out of the top ‘chamber’ of the wound. I swear the lump went down by a good two thirds, just from that. (We were going to take it in to show to the vet, but Poppy ate it. Eeeew!) Anyway, she’s definitely improving. The pus is pretty much all surface now, so it’s just a matter of keeping everything clean and making sure the infection is well and truly cleared up before she stops her antibiotics. Woohoo!

We’ve also managed to break Venus out of her broody spell. She’s spent the days in the broody coop with the door to the nesting area shut, so she’s bored, secure, and unable to nest. It only took three days of doing that for her to snap out of it. Brilliant! (And ironic.) Because she was within sight of the girls during the day, and back with them as soon as laying was finished (when we’d shut the pophole to everyone) there was no issue of them forgetting who she was. Now we just have to wait for her to start laying again.

Reintroducing Frida to the flock is taking a bit longer than we’d hoped. We’ve moved Bessie in with her, which is going well. And Claire and Lily are fine with her too. (She’s gone above poor Lily in the pecking order, but it’s not been a traumatic adjustment.) Neoli and Poppy, however, want nothing to do with her. They all bristle and hackle and pace up and down the mesh threatening violence.  Ella’s done the odd hackle-and-bristle too, but it’s much less frequent. (Or convincing.) We’ve tried having Bessie and Frida on the lawn and giving either Poppy or Neroli some very closely supervised interaction with her, but they’re still leaping into agro-mode as soon as they realise who it is. (And yes, Frida is the instigator as often as not.) After Poppy’s infection, I’m not in any hurry to get them to sort it out. They’ll get tired of it eventually.

As part of Frida’s rehabilitation, we’ve been giving her access to the lawn, hedge and herb bed. It proved so popular (and surprisingly un-destructive) that we’ve started making a point of giving everyone some supervised lawn time.

It really is a gorgeous sight. Grazing the lawn is popular. But the girls seem especially keen on the sorrel and the self-sown winter purslane in my raised herb beds, so they’re both getting quite a thrashing.

And then there is the utter bliss that is scritching through the piles of decaying hay along the hedge …

A few words of wisdom for those of you who are keen to try it with your own chooks:

• Make sure the yard is secure before you let anyone out. (Obvious, I know.)
• Ideally, try to let them out late in the afternoon, when they are calm and full – your garden will survive better if this is a treat rather than the best chance for a meal.
• Have a container with some sort of treat – meat, mealworms fruit, grain, whatever – somewhere handy but out of sight so that you can easily get the girls to come to you in an emergency.
• Cover anything vulnerable or poisonous. The girls will learn pretty quickly what is out of bounds (a scolding voice and a calm but firm push away from the item in question seems to do the trick for us) but you don’t want to be worrying about too many things at once.
• Try not to let too many out at once. We find four to five pretty manageable, but it will depend on the birds in question.
• Consider flock dynamics: if you have the top of the pecking order out with one of the bottom, it’s more likely to cause trouble than if you keep to similar status birds. (You don’t want anyone being chased. Keep it calm.)
• Sit down nearby, and enjoy!