I have 10 eggs due on Friday, they will all be RS progencecy. As the equinox has drawn closer, I have a hen, who is laying a very large Brown eggs. Large like my Welsummer stock had. But tricky thing is, I am unable to believe which hen I have deduced is laying the;. It is the smallest hen!! Photos to come soon.
Old news:
David, months ago had a fight against RS and Gooses son. The result of this fight was Davids right eye being stabbed and David running away for about 4 days to the neighbors garage. Despite hearing his crows across the way I, nor them, could find him in hiding. We didn't know he was blind, or his severity of his injuries. Luck have it, he recovered enough and all of a sudden reappeared into the coop one evening.... I took him in, and to care for him I isolated him. He had been infested with mites and the wounds were still raw. His eye healed and began to open again. A cloudy spot appeared where the injury had been. Though party blind, he can still see something out of it. Perhaps shadows or contrasting but somethings still there.
I tried many remedies for David to rid him of the mites and heal the wounds, as winter ranged on, the mites were not leaving. At the apex of all this we encountered some cold weather. I had a light on him but still, the mites he could not fight any longer. Though his body still healing with the cuts and wounds on his face, but now were being blood sucked. Also, compounded by the fact he was isolated, away from his family and any other chickens he began shutting down. I checked in on him one afternoon after work and he was standing but he was not alert, the previous 24hr cold snap had blackened his comb and wattle in frostbite. What was left was pale and not even red or pink, more like a dying of pale orange flesh. I took him into the bathroom, washed him in warm water, I cooked sweet potato and fed it to him, he ate eagerly. I let him soak in the warm water, the mites crawling up my shower curtain and walls. (Though I bleached, they were still a couple still crawling from who knows where...) Each time I reached in to position him or wash his neck, my hands were covered in biting mites. I didn't know how to kill them all. The brommer's soap did help. Soaking him up to his ears with water helped as well by drowning the suckers. But still mites crawled!!. Hours passed, he was patient, hanging in there, eating the sweet potato. I took to my medicine cabinet. I had peroxide and iodine. I drained the tub, filled back up with water fresh water to his feet. Then dosed his neck area of the mites with peroxide then rinsed. Then I soaked it with iodine. If anyone has every used iodine they know it stains. And when David shook his head, it stained my entire tub, carpet, and curtains. I didn't know if anything I had done worked. I set him in front of a hair dryer and kept him warm. I then rushed to the feed store, bought a new insecticide in powder form, and a bottle of cattle/swine dewormer which was expensive but could be used off label. But this is the thing, if he wouldn't have eaten, if he wouldn't have returned home, if he wouldn't have been standing, if I wouldn't have given him any chance what so ever, I wouldn't have tried so much. But David wanted to survive, he wanted this second chance, he was scared and he was hurt. I still remember the day I hand picked him out of the entire box of chicks, he was this little fluff with a vigor, with eye catching observance of me. There was a calmness of him, a trusting an understandence. For the years I have raised him he has been the same throughout. He is gentle to baby chicks, he is gentle to me. He guides his hens and never viciously attacked other roosters in dominance. There's no way I could just let him die with a fight.
Today, he hasn't had any mites since the iodine treatment. He is back with company, it is a hen who went broody in January (so wild) and hatched a chick. This chick by ways of genealogy is his great grand chick. He lets the chick with her blond and grey fluff, take piggy back rides on him and as always been calm, has been observant and just wonderful to everyone in the flock. A true success story.
Hope you have a great Equinox!
SpotOnFarms
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