Mulish & Co.

May Egg Count

 

Drum roll, please....total egg count for May 2012 is... 118.

With the guinea splitting and Hazel under the weather we have a weaker egg count than usual. I don't know that we will ever surpass our April count of 136. You'd think they'd taken on a laying challenge with their nemesis flock down the road in April. They made me proud. We kicked some feathered ass that month.

May was rough and we're now down 2 producers. We may have had an unfair advantage with La Bête on our team but hey, an egg is an egg is an egg unless it's something like a hummingbird egg which I would never dare to eat but any egg coming from a bird larger than a chicken is pretty much fair game.

Sour Crop Recovery: She Lives!

Our girl, Hazel, has made a full recovery, from what exactly, I don't know. It started about three weeks ago with sour crop and morphed into something else entirely. I suspect that she developed sour crop from eating all of the timothy hay that I used to fill the nestboxes. I couldn't get straw and I don't like to use wood shavings so I picked up timothy hay from a pet store. It didn't help any that I had never made grit available to the birds. Birds don't have teeth to break down food. Instead, they eat grit which rolls around with the food and works as a rough equivalent for teeth.

How did I know she had sour crop? A few days after she gorged on the hay her crop became soft and squishy and huge. Her breath was wicked wretched. I cannot emphasize just how foul it was. When I jiggled her crop you could hear the fluid sloshing around. She threw up a lot, probably close to a cup that first day. Looking back on all of this, I'm surprised I didn't drop dead from the sheer horror of it all.

The sour crop cleared up with a kefir-yogurt-green tea only diet for 2 days. I also had to manually empty her crop which I won't go into here. There seemed to be some slight improvement but then she began to have weakness in her legs, she was wobbly and stumbling, lost her appetite, continued to lose weight and at it's worst, her eyes weren't "right". A trip to the vet that I work with and a few x-rays ruled out an obstruction or tumor or egg binding but showed what looked like polyostotic hypertosis. I won't even pretend to know what that is. It's something with her bones. They look mottled. How's that for vague? "It all goes back to the ovaries," the radiologist said. They also gave her sub-q fluids and that seemed to make her feel better for a day.

I put her on the antibiotics that were recommended but did not keep her on them for as long as was recommended. I used it for three and a half days instead of a full week. She was depressed being in isolation and her appetite improved when I let her rejoin her flock. She was still stumbling and tripping for several days. I kept waiting for her to give me a sign that it was time to cull her, instead, she began to get better - her drinking and eating kept improving, she stumbled less. I made sure she was getting water by giving her watermelon which she absolutely loves. And tonight, for the first time in three weeks, she ran full throttle towards me from the far end of the yard when she saw that I had a fistful of collard greens for her. She even gave one of the Sussex a sharp rap on the head when she was tearing into the collards. The lady is back!

I know this is a recap for anyone that's been reading all along but I can see that there are people finding my blog by searching for help with sour crop so I thought I'd post this summary of Hazel's illness. Again, I'm not sure how the sour crop spun out of control. One of the doctors theorized that she may have had low potassium or calcium levels and that made her stumble. I think that adding apple cider vinegar to her water and putting her on a kefir & yogurt diet helped immensely. They neutralize the ph in the gut and crop.

It took a good three weeks for her to recover but you'd never know she was down by looking at her. She hasn't laid any eggs since all this happened and I don't know if she ever will. Our other Buff Orpington has quit laying already and she's only 2 yrs old. The Sussex and Delawares are our strongest layers. But you can't beat an Orpington for friendliness. They are The Ambassadors of The Backyard Chicken. Long live The Ambassador!

A Poem

I couldn't have come across this poem at a better time. It was in todays Writer's Almanac. If you don't subscribe to Writer's Almanac, do! It's very often the first email I read each day. There is always something interesting to be learned. It's a great way to start out the day.

Passage

by John Brehm

 

In all the woods that day I was
the only living thing
fretful, exhausted, or unsure.
Giant fir and spruce and cedar trees
that had stood their ground
three hundred years
stretched in sunlight calmly
unimpressed by whatever
it was that held me
hunched and tense above the stream,
biting my nails, calculating all
my impossibilities.
Nor did the water pause
to reflect or enter into
my considerations.
It found its way
over and around a crowd
of rocks in easy flourishes,
in laughing evasions and
shifts in direction.
Nothing could slow it down for long.
It even made a little song
out of all the things
that got in its way,
a music against the hard edges
of whatever might interrupt its going.

Wherein The Mule Rants

This does not feel like a short work week at all. In fact, each afternoon that I go to work, it feels like two shifts back to back. Aside from the regulars who call daily to give an update and detailed description of their pets fecal matter and habits of defecation, we've had a high number of poor planners looking to board their pets on short notice. Word to the wise - you can never reserve kennel space too early.

I feel like I am overloaded with "superficial" information, information not really meant for retention or absorption (just info meant to get me through the day and to perform specific tasks) that by the end of the day I feel completely depleted. So much of it just pings off the surface of my brain.

At a certain point it all seems so absurd. I had a customer call to say she was about to plant lantana. This, I thought, will be a lovely conversation. In a fleeting second I thought about all the colors it comes in and how she was bound to see more butterlies in her garden. A friend, at last, in a sea of canine ailments. But what she wanted to know was if the lantana would be toxic to her dog. Yes, the doctor said, lantana is toxic to pets. When I shared the information with the client she said with relief, "I'm so glad I called! I'm not going to plant it then. Thank you!" So pleasant, so sweet, so...completely disappointing.

Maybe my dogs have just mastered the art of identifying toxic plants but they've yet to poison themselves with my daylilies or lantana. Not that I have much of either but they are more likely to gravitate towards grass or chicken poop. Yes, they get bellyaches, yes they throw up but I'll be damned if I'm going to garden around them. It's survival of the fittest around here, natural selection, baby. We see more animals in the hospital for eating socks and panties than we do for ingesting toxic plant material but I've yet to hear any of our clients exclaim, "Well, then, I'm not wearing socks or panties anymore. I'm glad I called!" I don't know, maybe all of our clients are sockless and walking around au naturel underneath and I just haven't noticed. I am quite often in my own little world.

*For a short list of plants known to be toxic to pets, click here.

 

Sad Tiger

Sad tiger at bus stop on Oak Springs