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Minerva Louise happily free ranging

Minerva Louise relaxing in the shade.
She's such a tiny bird. So cute.

Minerva Louise seems to be getting better each day. Today is her last day of antibiotics. Her poops (I like to refer to them as her 'report cards') have been looking good, so that's giving me hope.

She also laid something nasty yesterday. Which, after a quick google search, I learned was called a "lash egg". Don't google it. They can be pretty gross. (But of course, I'm going to post a picture here, so prepare yourself! LOL! It's below.) The jury is out on whether a 'lash egg' is a good sign or a bad sign. It definitely indicates that the chicken has been fighting off an infection. I am hoping that it is a sign that she's over the infection, and in the passing of this lash egg, she's closing the door on the illness. The more negative thinking is that if she passed a lash egg, then she's pretty much doomed. I'm choosing to stay positive and hoping she will be a survivor. She is acting and eating normally.

So, what is a lash egg? First off, it's not an egg at all. Basically it's a ball of pus that is created in response to an infection in the hen's oviduct. Yuck. Poor girl. So, if we hadn't already been aware that Minerva Louise had been sick, this would have been a very bad thing to find. But because we already knew that she was ill, and have been treating her with antibiotics for the past 10 days, I'm hoping that she's going to beat this thing.

Okay, here are the gross pictures, get ready (or just scroll past them really fast)....

This is Minerva Louise's "lash egg". Not really an egg. And totally gross.
It felt more like a sausage, actually.
(Sorry for that, and I won't be eating sausage anytime soon now.)

Of course I dissected it! It's the scientist in me.
I had to find out what the heck it was!
(Again, my apologies.)
But admit it, some of you were curious, too, right?!
(No? Just me?)

ANOTHER BIG, AWFUL DISCOVERY....

So, we knew that poor Mayzie died due to a problem with her egg laying system, and we knew that Minerva Louise was having a similar egg laying problem, but we didn't know exactly WHY. Well, as the weeks went on, a few of my other hens started laying rubber eggs, too. (A rubber egg is an egg that is missing the hard outer shell. Click on this link to watch my quick video from last September to see one and learn more about rubber eggs: Rubber Eggs.) Rubber eggs aren't gross, don't worry. :)

I just didn't understand it! WHY?! Why were more of my hens having these problems? They had plenty of calcium-providing oyster shells available to them at all times. I had been giving them the same high-end chicken food for the last year. In fact, I traveled 4 towns away just to buy them their very special non-gmo, organic, soy-free layer pellets. The best of the best, and not cheap either. So what the heck was the problem? What were they eating, or not eating, that was causing this?

And then it hit me.

I ran out to the barn this morning to check the bag of feed. And there was the answer. The supply store had given me the WRONG type of feed!

They had accidentally given me chicken feed that was GROWER PELLETS instead of LAYER PELLETS. Grower pellets are for young chickens who are not laying eggs yet. It is full of protein and very little calcium. My hens, at their age, need the opposite... They need lots of calcium and less protein. My girls were starving for CALCIUM. (Even though they had the supplemental oyster shells available to them, they just weren't eating them. They have never eaten them, even when I tried to hand feed them as treats. So, for my girls, those oyster shells are useless.)

Now you might wonder how the heck did they give me the wrong type of feed without anyone noticing? Sadly, this brand of feed packs all their different types of feed in the same exact bags. The only way to tell the different feeds apart is a little paper tag along the seam of the bag, which either gets ripped off as you open the bag, or if you open it from the other end, it sits on the bottom where you can't see it anymore. (This was the case for my bag.) Dumb, dumb packaging design.

Can you tell the difference between these two bags of chicken feed?....

The bag on the left is the LAYER feed
The bag on the right is the GROWER feed
The labels indicating that? On the bottom of the bags.
 Yes, underneath the bags. :(

I had asked for two bags of layer feed. Sadly, I got one bag of layer feed and one bag of grower feed. And I didn't realize the error until the damage had been done.

So why did I lose my sweet Mayzie almost two weeks ago? Human error. First error by the supply store and second error by me for not double-checking the label. Ugh. Feeling pretty awful about this. I think she had been more vulnerable to this lack of calcium problem because she had gone broody, and then had to eat the chick feed while she was with them. (Too much calcium can cause kidney problems in baby chicks, so their feed is lower in calcium.) So Mayzie had not been getting the correct amount of calcium for a long time, and clearly that threw her system out of balance. I don't know why she didn't try to make up for that by eating the crushed oyster shells. So, yes, sadly she died from something that I should have been able to fix if I had realized the error. So awful.

The strange thing is that I actually just changed my hens' feed this past weekend. I made the change before I discovered the mistake of the "Grower Feed" label. But something in my gut was telling me that the problems had to be with their food even though I couldn't imagine why since their feed hadn't changed in almost a year (...Or so I thought. Obviously, I just wasn't aware of the mistake at that point.) So I switched them to a different brand, with the correct amount of calcium. I just hope my other girls will all recover easily now that they are getting the correct nutrients. And you can be sure that I will be checking every single label very closely with every purchase from here on out. A very hard lesson learned.

TEENAGERS....

My girl, Ruby, really is a beautiful bird.
Love this Silver Grey Dorking breed.

This made me so happy.
Usually the teenagers operate in teams of two.
But the other day Matilda chose to snuggle in close with Charlotte and Fern.

Look how grown up the Welsummer chicks are getting!
And they are so much less shy now.