Glen Hill Farm: November 2015

Late Fall on the farm

There was a line at the nesting boxes the other morning.
Such good girls!

My daffodil is over her hard molt, but she now has another issue going on. I noticed some white wart-ish type dots on her comb recently. I can't remember exactly when I first noticed them... definitely a few weeks ago, maybe even a month ago? Maybe they appeared when she started her molt? I didn't think much of them at first, and thought they might go away on their own, but they haven't. Other than the tiny unsightly white bumps, she is acting healthy--eating, drinking and acting chicken-y.

Can you see the tiny white bumps?

Her comb is also very dry.

Thanks to the internet, I've narrowed down the cause of these hard white dots to two different possibilities...

The first possibility is that she has dry fowl pox which is a virus that chickens get by being bitten by an infected mosquito. The bad news is that there is no treatment for this dry fowl pox and it is possible to spread it from bird to bird. The good news is that it shouldn't be fatal. It will run its course and she'll recover. And once a chicken has had it, it can't catch it again.

The second possibility is that she has favus which is a skin condition caused by a fungus. It is possible for it to spread from bird to bird, but again luckily, favus is usually not fatal. And favus is treatable by putting miconazole nitrate 2% cream on their combs. My lady friends out there might recognize 'miconazole nitrate' as the active ingredient in the medication used to treat a yeast infection.

Since I'm not totally sure which condition she has, but one has a treatment option, I decided to start the treatment for favus to see if it helps. Off to Target I went to buy some Monistat 7.

I guess now is the time to admit that even though I am a 43 year old woman, somehow I still kind of dread buying tampons and the like. I usually sort of put any feminine products in the bottom of my cart, and hide it under a roll of paper towels or something. (Guess I'm still an awkward teenager deep down inside.)

So as I'm reluctantly handing my box of Monistat 7 to the cashier, I actually had the urge to say "It's not for me! It's for my chicken!" I kid you not. I almost actually said that. Thank God my brain realized in time how much creepier THAT would have sounded to the cashier. Would she have thought that my chicken had a yeast infection? Or worse, would she have thought that I named my vagina 'chicken'? Either way, I decided to keep my mouth shut and just let her think that I should eat more yogurt.

Time will tell whether Daffodil is fighting dry fowl pox or favus. Hopefully, she will survive it without too much trouble and fingers crossed that it doesn't spread to my other girls. Where Daffodil is a bit of a loner, it helps my chances of it sticking just with her.

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Jonathan has been busy building a new pen on our farm. Such a handy guy. I wonder who it's for???