Hen-pecked

Checking in for my daily no-baby-yet news. Don't want anyone to panic!

In other news, we had a little chicken incident today. We had a bunch of chickens get out of the fence today and as we were gathering them up to put back in, I noticed lots of bright red blood on the tail of one of them. I grabbed her and she was quite a mess. At first, we thought that Chief Wahoo may have gotten her, but upon inspection, it looks like she just got pecked a little too much. We put her back in with the others and they immediately started to peck her again. Obviously, that wasn't going to work.

So, Don pulled down a big cage from the barn rafters (left behind from the previous owners) and I tried to clean her up as best I could. I applied some St. John's Wort oil on the injury and am hoping that will speed the healing process. I put her in the cage with food, water, and some bedding. She is staying in the barn, at least for tonight. She won't be too happy being by herself, but it has to be better than getting pecked like that. We'll see what she looks like in the morning, but this evening, when I was making the chicken rounds, she looked much better already.

I have no idea what set this whole thing off. What on earth made the other ones start pecking? She had a fairly bald back already, but most of the chickens are molting, so that's not unusual. Who knows? Well, we are hoping this doesn't become a trend. Can't we all just get along?