Funeral

Ellie lay in state wrapped in a towel in the fiberglass greenhouse from the day of her death on Tuesday, January 22, until the weather warmed up a little today. I had hoped it would get warm enough to defrost the ground a little, but with freezing rain in the forecast, we couldn’t wait long. Hilda carried the body while I took the shovel back to a quiet place in the trees by the creek. We interred Ellie in the hole Terry dug for Della back in December when we thought her death was imminent. I chipped away at the soil piled up by the hole, dislodging most of it to cover Ellie, still wrapped in her terrycloth shroud. We put four stones on top of her to discourage scavengers.

The creek had a fair amount of water in it, covered by ice. That was a bit of good news for such a sad, gray morning. We said our last goodbyes to Ellie and walked back to the house with a strong, cold wind in our faces. She was a good chicken. We miss her.

I hope Della makes it to the spring thaw.

Farewell, Ellie



Sweet little Ellie, May 1, 2012-January 22, 2013

But the cold of the winter and the wind laid her low
And she's gone on before me now where shall I go?
                                     "A Cowboy's Hard Times" by Bill Staines

Quick update

Ellie doesn’t like yogurt. She doesn’t like scrambled eggs either, with or without yogurt. We got her to eat some dried mealworms yesterday. After pondering for a bit on how to get some probiotic bacteria into her, it occurred to me that I had powdered yogurt starter in my freezer. Duh! Hilda wetted three mealworms and sprinkled them with the starter. Ellie ate them.

Today she won’t even eat mealworms. I made her some oatmeal. She didn’t eat that either. We are at a loss. She’s back in the coop now. Hilda thought she wasn’t eating because she was lonesome. There was a post on backyardchickens.com from another chicken owner whose chicken would not eat in solitude. As for Ellie, either she starts eating or she doesn’t. We’re back in the nineteenth century—all we can do is watch and hope.

Like yogurt for chicken

Our attitudes toward death have changed since Pasteur proved that many diseases were caused by microorganisms. Before doctors started washing their hands and sterilizing surgical equipment (thanks, Joseph Lister!) 150 years ago, people were more accepting of death. The causes of death from infectious diseases were legion—diphtheria, scarlet fever, plague, malaria, cholera, small pox, measles, and many others. The most tragic, to my mind, was childbed fever, a direct result of doctors going from cadaver work to delivering babies without washing their hands. How many young women died so needlessly?  If you were really lucky, you lived long enough to die of the same thing we die of now—cancer, heart disease, and stroke. But in some cases, if the Victorian novels are to be believed, people died of broken hearts and mysterious fevers pretty often. No matter what, all that could be done was to gather the family around the bedside to watch and pray.

Then, in 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. It became widely available after World War II. Vaccines for most childhood diseases followed. Who dies of infectious diseases anymore? Not many. Within two generations, cheating death has become an integral part of our culture. When someone gets sick, even with a disease that is, at its root, old age, we feel we should Do Something, and we have a reasonable expectation that that Something will be more effective than watching and praying at the bedside.

The first week in December, I rushed our cat Della to the vet because she wasn’t eating much and had grown quite thin. She is 18, which is very, very old in cat years. She had end-stage kidney failure, a common cause of death in elderly cats. I refused a follow-up blood panel ($400, ka-ching) but did ask if I could Do Something to make her comfortable until she died. And that’s why as I write this there is a bag of sterile Ringer’s solution hanging on the lamp next to me by a paper clip and a cable tie. Every evening I insert an 18-gauge needle under her skin and let 100 ml of fluid drip in. In the last few days she’s started eating more. She may live forever.

This last week, Ellie, our very favorite chicken, wasn’t looking good. She too had lost a good deal of weight and hung around the coop listlessly on the cold mornings. This will be good for me, I thought, I will get used to chickens dying. Hilda and I briefly discussed trying to find a chicken vet, but spending that kind of money on something with so short a life span seemed wrong, even if we could find a vet who treated chickens. We will just let her go. We have been lucky to have kept all 10 for so long.

But of course, I still had to ask the question. Can we Do Something?

I typed “weight loss” into the search box of backyardchickens.com. I poked around a little and found a disease called “sour crop.” There wasn’t a lot of scientific information, but I gathered that the crop harbors helpful bacteria that are important in fermenting the chickens’ food to release nutrients. Sometimes the wrong kinds of microbes take over the crop, which can lead to symptoms similar to we were observing. It also gives the chicken bad breath. Who smells their chickens’ breath? The crop should feel like a water balloon instead of a hard lump. I had read about eggs getting stuck, which can cause death. I looked that up as well. It’s called “egg bound” in the business and is readily diagnosed by palpating the back end of the chicken where the egg can be felt in the abdominal cavity.

I was at work when I found all this out. I called Hilda and instructed her to feel the front and back of the chicken, check for odd smells, and isolate Ellie from the rest of the flock in case what she had was contagious. She verified that the crop wasn’t full, but it wasn’t exactly squishy either. She didn’t notice any unusual smell. The rest of the treatment was to withhold food for 24 hours to empty the crop and give Ellie water laced with organic, unfiltered apple cider vinegar (ACV, for those in the know—took me a while to put that together as I scrolled through the discussion board) with the “mother” (fermenting organisms) to lower the pH of the crop to its normal level and kill the bad bugs. After 24 hours, the chicken should be fed full-fat yogurt, which can be mixed with organic applesauce (which the chickens like) to introduce the right bacteria back into the crop. There was controversy about feeding the chickens bread soaked in olive oil. Some recommended it; some felt the risk of encouraging yeast was too high. Several posts recommended scrambled eggs for protein. Cannabalism!

Hilda called back to say that the ACV found in the grocery was the wrong stuff. The kind we needed was sold for horses. I stopped at Tractor Supply on my way home. The man there looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. I checked at the grocery in the same strip mall, but they only had filtered. Finally, believe it or not, I found “all natural” (not organic) unfiltered ACV “with the mother” at WalMart. It would do.

When I got home, Ellie was caged in the garage. We set up the vinegar water and moved the coop cam so we could keep an eye on her from inside the house.  I tried getting her to drink the water from a dropper without success. I put her back in the cage where she began drinking on her own pretty soon.

Ellie and the coop cam watch each other

Ellie settles in for the night. This picture was taken with the coop cam.

And it came to pass that I found myself last night starting a batch of yogurt with whole milk. I make yogurt every weekend without fail, but always with skim milk. This is the first time I ever made yogurt for a chicken. The things we do for love. At least we can Do Something, even though we have no idea if we are even treating the right thing. It remains to be seen if she will pull through.

On a happier note, Terry installed the potbelly wood stove we got from Uncle Dick’s estate in the tractor shed. He can keep the shed toasty warm while he’s working out there. Dick would be pleased, I think.

The wood stove

A bad morning

This is our heated chicken waterer. The red part attached to the white part with interlocking grooves. I am not fond of its design. It must be filled from the bottom and then flipped into an upright position. This process can’t be done without spillage. Everything that I’ve read about chickens in winter suggests that they can take about anything as long as the coop stays dry. Thus, during my morning chores, I remove the waterer from the coop as carefully as I can, trying (often in vain) to keep it straight so it doesn’t spill, and do all the water changing and flipping outside.

Heated waterer sitting on cement blocks. The cord is visible in the lower left.

All was going according to plan today until I dropped the waterer in the coop. Due to the cold temperatures this morning, I had not opened the coop door. A three-gallon waterer crashing to the floor was enough to cause an uproar among the chickens, let me tell you. Squawking and feathers everywhere. I picked up the waterer as quickly as possible and set it back outside. As the girls in the coop settled down, I heard clucking from the wrong direction. I looked outside again. There was Ellie, who is always curious about what is beyond the human door, walking around in the sunshine. Although she had never been on that side of the coop, her clucking did not suggest alarm. She seemed to know she was in the wrong place but was not able to figure out what she needed to do about it. She walked away from me when I tried to pick her up. After a few do-si-dos, she walked back inside on her own accord. I followed her and shut the door to the yard.

The wet bedding seemed to be confined to a square-foot area under the feeder. I used the dust pan to scoop it into the poop bucket, which was already mostly full from that morning’s clean up. We haven’t changed the wood chips in the coop since October so that the heat of the decomposing poop and wood chips helps warm the coop. Nevertheless, each morning we do try to remove the poop that is on the top to keep the odor down. The wet wood chips filled the poop bucket to capacity. I wiped the rest of the water off the floor with a paper towel and covered the spot with clean chips.

I looked at the waterer. It was a mess. It had poop and wood chips stuck all over it. I thought briefly about ignoring it. No, I told myself, do the grown-up thing. I took it to the laundry sink in the basement, leaving my coop boots at the door. I rinsed the dirt off of the outside, gave the inside of the reservoir and the trough a good wipe down using only water and a paper towel. Chickens, like most birds, are extremely sensitive to chemicals. I noticed that I had damaged the reservoir. The plastic showed signs of stress. I must have dropped it on the cement blocks that keep the waterer off the floor. If there was a hole in the reservoir, the water would drain out of the trough without stopping. I’d better check to see if it still holds water.

I attached the trough to the reservoir and pulled out the rubber plug. The faucet, of course, was not in the right position to fill the reservoir. I got the utility hose from under the sink and screwed it on. I filled the reservoir about halfway. In the process of trying to turn the waterer upright, the bottom came off. Water splashed up out of the sink and soaked my coat sleeve. A fair amount went on the floor also, which I discovered by stepping in it. This was not going well. I got an old towel from the back room and mopped up the floor.

I filled the reservoir again and managed to get it upright into the sink while the trough was still attached. The trough filled and the water stopped moving. Good. No holes. I turned it upside down again and filled it the rest of the way. I left it in the sink while I changed my socks. I put my boots back on and carried the waterer upside down to the coop, flipped it just before I went in, and set it carefully on the cement blocks.

I took the poop pail to the fiberglass green house to empty it into a muck bucket. Normally, this leaves the bucket clean. Why was I surprised when wet poop and wood chips stuck all over the sides? I went back to the coop to get the putty knife that we use for poop scraping and cleaned the bucket as best I could.

Now all I had to do was clean the laundry sink with a disinfecting wipe. I detached the utility hose and, underestimating the amount of water still in it, promptly emptied it onto the floor. Fortunately my socks were not involved this time, and the mop-up towel was ready at hand. After I sterilized the hose, the faucet, and the sink, I had to have a cup of tea to restore myself. I hate it when I make so much work for myself.
When I went to check on the girls later, everyone was calm again.

Hanging out in the coop

Happy New Year!

In the wee hours of the morning of December 31, I got to fretting that when the snow on the electric netting around the chicken yard melted it was going to conduct electricity and electrocute both the chickens and me. I discussed it with Terry when we were fully awake and having our morning beverages. “It can’t happen,” he assured me. “That’s what grounding is for.”

I did not share his confidence mostly because I don’t share his understanding of electricity. Seriously, I don’t get why electrons don’t leak out of outlets when nothing is plugged in. It’s all very mysterious to me. I had just gotten a catalog from the company that sells the electric netting, so I read up on the hazards. The only hazard associated with snow was that the snow could lay down the fence. I had noticed that the snow was pulling on the netting, making it difficult to latch it to the coop. I resolved to clear away the biggest drift.

The chicken yard before I shoveled. Hilda had shoveled some of the snow away shortly after it fell a week ago.

Closer view of the drift, which comes about halfway up the fence

New Year’s Eve was warmer than I thought it would be. I went out about 11:00 when the temperatures were in the mid-20s and shoveled. I cleared away a little more of the deep snow for the chickens as long as I was out there. I put the snow in a wheelbarrow and dumped it, according to Terry’s suggestion, between the tractor shed and the garage. The snow was packed. I could have cut it into block and built an igloo.

The snow pile between the tractor shed and the garage

My shadow and the spot I cleared around the fence

I was cavalier about leaving the fence open when I emptied the wheelbarrow. The girls were all in the coop, and they stayed there. After 45 minutes, I had the fence free and decided that was enough for the day. The moment I latched the gate for the last time, the chickens came out. How did they know I was done? My mission was accomplished; it was easier to clip the fence closed.

I spent the afternoon preparing my share of the New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day foods. I baked the last of the Christmas cookies, which I had cut out and frozen the week before. I mixed up a batch of pecan caramel rolls for breakfast. I cut two ribeye steaks into chunks for the hot oil fondue. Finally, I made cocktail sauce.

Hilda prepared shrimp and breaded mushrooms for the fondue and made curry sauce and teriyaki sauce for dipping. She also served broccoli and cauliflower in cheese sauce. We had a nice dinner frying our steak, shrimp, and mushrooms one bite at a time. I meant to take a picture of the proceedings but forgot. All I’ve got is a picture of the cookie tray, which I took before we opened the champagne. We watched our usual selection of holiday videos and went to bed at 10:30. It was past midnight somewhere in the world.

New Year's Eve cookie plate. The chocolate cookies are Christmas bison, which are structurally more sound than moose or reindeer, with their fragile skinny legs and antlers.

 

New Year’s Day was very cold, -0.7° when we got up at 7:00. Hilda delayed opening the coop until after our caramel roll breakfast (I forgot to take a picture of those too).  The girls came out to enjoy the sunny afternoon, regardless of the low temperatures.

The girls stretch their legs on a cold but sunny afternoon

Bridget, who was pure white for the longest time, seems to be getting a bit of brown on her feathers. At first I just thought she had been under the perch at a bad time, but the color has persisted longer than dirt would have.

Bridget (in front) shows some color on her neck feathers

Perhaps the most exciting thing that has happened over the holidays is the installation of the coop cam. My brother and sister-in-law got us a security camera to put in the coop. Someday soon I will call tech support to figure out how to access it through the internet. In the meantime, we can see what the girls are doing in the coop from our computers in the house, even at night through an infrared feature. It is very fun and quite addictive. I haven’t been able to figure out how to record video in a format that I can open, but it is easy to take still pictures.

The view from the coop cam