Sasha

In Brief

last updated 26.06.12

Hatched: 18th November 2010
Died:  24.01.12

Weight: 2.40 kg

Breed: Rhode Island Red

Total number of eggs: 186
Biggest egg: 68 g
Smallest egg: 43 g
Average weight: 59.6 g

The Arrival

Sasha was one of the two Rhode Island Red pullets to hatch from Poppy’s Horde – little Orange. She was quite striking, right from the start, with dark eye markings and stripes on her body. She also had an Unfortunate Incident as a bub – she got caught in a matted loop of Poppy’s bottom fluff.  Which was bad enough, even worse was that the more Sasha called in distress (understandable), the more frantically Poppy swung around, trying to find her and save her … we managed to intervene before any harm befell either of them.

She grew into quite a striking girl – more stand-offish than her sister Erica, but still quite willing to be handled. She also developed a rather amusing dippy crouch – she would drop until her keel was scrapping the ground, like Lily does, but would then keep her body entirely still but waggle her head from side to side … and yes, I’m afraid we did take advantage and trigger it for our own amusement from time to time. She didn’t seem to hold any grudges.

Laying

Sasha was an amazing layer. She laid her first egg on May 29th, and it was beautiful. 43 g, brown, with spots. And she just kept on laying and laying! Rhodies are meant to be good layers – the modern laying hybrids are from Rhodie parentage – but Sasha was easily the best Rhodie we’d ever had in that respect. She laid 19 eggs in her first month, and was the fourth best. But after that, it was straight to the top – Layer of the Month for July 2011 (25 eggs), 2nd in August (24 eggs), 1st in September (26 eggs), ditto October (27 eggs), November (26 eggs), and December (28 eggs). She was Layer of the Year for 2011, with 177 eggs, and set a new record for the longest continual laying of any of our girls – 34 eggs in a row, from 18th November to 21st December.

And

Then it all went wrong. On January 9th, we discovered her with a prolapsed vent. To make matters worse, the other birds had obviously been pecking at it, and everything was a horrible mess. We got her to Aunty Pauline, and after much struggle (which you can read about in the relevant posts here and here) we managed to get everything healed and seemingly back to normal. We’d actually been discussing with the vet the time-frame for reintegrating her back into the flock. And then, two weeks after her prolapse, she died suddenly of a respiratory obstruction. Just like that – no warning, and nothing anyone could do. One of those things.

We buried her in the orchard under a double-grafted nectarine tree, so she keeps an eye on her siblings, and we can say hello to her in the mornings. So far the tree has been, like Sasha, quite fecund.

Sweet little noodle-girl. We miss her.