Chicken having a (saw)dust bath

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 25 January 2012 in chickens | 3 comments

Every time I clean out the chicken coop, I marvel at how they’ve managed to get wood shavings EVERYWHERE. Now I know why:

One down – Minnie the Black Minorca chicken died overnight :(

Posted by louisa on Sunday 14 November 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

As I mentioned on Twitter earlier, we had our first* chicken death here on Saturday night/Sunday morning. It was the little Black Minorca, who we only brought home on Friday. Sigh.

When I went down to see them on Saturday, she was hiding under the little shelter I’d built and wasn’t interested in coming out – she was next to the drinker and I left her a little pile of food nearby. It was damp and she’d had a scary couple of days so I wasn’t going to rush her. When we got back from Southport though, she was still under there. All the others had put themselves to bed but she hadn’t.

She didn’t try to run away when I picked her up from under there – which in hindsight should have been a sign something wasn’t right. I took her to the coop and tried to place her on a perch – but she was holding her legs strangely and wouldn’t grasp it, so I placed her on the coop floor instead. I went back into the house and told John I was worried about her because she seemed really weak – and it turns out I was right to be worried: this morning, we found her dead very near where I left her.