Bumble Foot

I was giving "the girls" some watermelon rind for their afternoon snack the other day when I noticed two of them had what looked like giant blisters between their toes. I'd read about a condition called bumble foot on the Backyard Chickens forum at some point. When I got a chance to look it up later that afternoon, one of the posts had detailed instructions about how to treat it. With DIY surgery! What?!

According to this post, with pictures, all I needed to do was soak the foot in salt water, pull off the black "plug" and get the hard yellow stuff out, then pack it with Neosporin and bandage it up. Easy as chicken soup, right? 

 No, Marsala, we are not making chicken soup

I started with the Wyandote since she is a little older and more docile than the Australorp. I got everything I needed together and enlisted The Music Man to hold them while I "operated". He was too busy holding the chicken to take any pictures of that, but if you must see what it looks like, you can go here.

This is where years of working as a vet tech has paid off. I've watched countless surgery on cats and dogs and bandaged them up afterward. Surprisingly, the hen didn't squirm around too much. I'll spare you the details.

Next up was the younger, bigger Australorp, Eleanor. To add to the challenge, she has it on both feet. I think I got it all and The Music Man may have a new career as chicken vet tech.

She's a beautiful hen, though in this picture she looks a little bit like the Loch Ness Chicken.

I'm a little leery about putting them back in the run with the bandages but it's too hot to keep them in the dog crate, so I'll just have to keep an eye on them, and move the chicken ark more often. 

In a little over a week, my sister, Vicki, will be taking care of things here while we go to Ireland. She's not crazy about chickens, especially their big, ugly feet.

 

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Time flies, whether you're having fun or not! We've done a good bit of work around the suburban homestead this Spring.

The raised beds are growing pretty well. 

They've gone from empty...

to leafy.

 

It never ceases to amaze me  that you can put seeds 

in a pile of dirt and stuff grows.

The Music Man built a cage for the strawberries.

No, they weren't trying to escape but the chipmunk family 

that lives under that part of the backyard 

was doing all their fruit shopping in my strawberry bed.

The chickens are all healthy and doing fine.

 

 

The Australorps are turning out to be good layers.

As a matter of fact, I'm kind of over run with eggs at the moment! 

And this was after I gave a dozen to a neighbor this morning!

I just love Spring.

Four Egg Day

 I didn't hear from everybody today but it was real close.

Another good thing about the warmer temperatures and longer days is that the girls have finally started laying eggs again. At Christmas, I had to break down and buy some at the grocery store!

The Gold Laced Wyandottes, Marsalla and Eggbirda were just taking a winter break. The younger Austrolorps, Diana, Florence and Betty are seven months old now and just starting to lay.

A cute little pullet egg next to a mature hen egg.

If the girls keep this up, I'll have to start giving eggs away soon. I have a couple of friends in the area who are going to start keeping bees in the Spring. What do you think, could we trade eggs for honey?

Omlette, anyone?

Dino Dixie Chicks

The chicks were cute and they were messy. We converted a big plastic bin into a brooder and set them up in the garage.

They didn't stay little for long though. Before we were ready with the ark, they were in the dinosaur stage. This roughly corresponds with early adolescence so dinosaur is an appropriate description. Like T Rex.

Hey, can I eat that camera?

See what I mean about the dinosaur stage?

We did have some concerns about our dog, Daisy, sharing the backyard with them. She has been seen catching and eating live baby birds (gag) whenever she can. Other than that, she's a lovely dog. Really.

I'm a big fan of Cesar Milan so I used some of the Dog Whisperer mojo on her.

By July, the ark was ready.

Empty nest no more, sort of.

Nest Empty No More, Sort Of

In an earlier post I mentioned that my chickens didn't like the ice much either. You may have said, "She has chickens? That's weird." Yeah, I guess it is. We don't live on a farm or ranch or even out in the country, but in an older neighborhood of one of the most densely populated areas of the state, just to the south of Birmingham.

About a year and a half ago, the Music Man jokingly asked if I wanted to get some chickens. Little did he know that I had been secretly planning this very thing but was waiting for the right time to spring it on him. He had lots of questions and a few objections, to which I had answers. Before I knew it I was browsing through poultry catalogs trying to decide what kind of chickens I wanted. He promised to help me build a tractor for them and set about looking at chicken coop plans online. Here's where we found them: http://www.backyardchickens.com/

Tractor? Do you have images of chickens sitting on the seat of a red tractor, steering with their wings and using their toes on the clutch?


No, a chicken tractor is a portable coop/run that rolls across the ground so that you can give the chickens fresh pasture on a regular basis. However, by the time we finished the thing it morphed into an ark rather than a tractor because we couldn't figure out how to put wheels on the thing without raising it up off the ground, leaving space for chickens to get out and varmits to get in. Ours ended up looking like this:

Of course, this was before we put the chickens in. It hasn't looked this nice since then, but it keeps them warm and dry, mostly.