So, I was wrong. I’m a rubbish husband to my chickens. Vicious was still poorly today and so I decided to give her a better examination only to find that she is egg bound after all. The poor girl’s been egg bound for 2 days now and I hadn’t noticed. I feel so stupid.

With the help of Daisy we fed her a good dose of olive oil to help lubricate her insides. She wasn’t at all happy and when we put her into the house she had taken a real disliking to us and couldn’t even look at us. Awww.

If she’s still poorly tomorrow morning I might try to get her to have something calcium-rich and then she’s going in the bath for a warm soak. This will help her to relax the muscles around the vent and possibly pass the egg. Then I’ll create a box for her into which she will go where it will be dark and warm, lined with straw. This will help her to concentrate on passing the egg. If there’s still no luck by later in the day, I think some oil will need to be passed directly into the oviduct and some gentle massaging of her undercarriage to help the egg out.

Worst case scenario is to break the egg inside and pull it all out, but that can cause all manner of problems of its own, so that’s really last resort.

So, I’ve been looking after the chicken all day now. This morning I built a small run out of the run that came with our chicken house. It was much too small, so I built a large one but we kept the parts to make up the smaller run. However, it may have been too small for 4 chickens to live in, but it makes an ideal hospitalisation ward!

I put Vicious (that’s her name because she’s top of the pecking order) in the run and gave her some fresh water, some fresh grit and some food. She didn’t eat the food, looked suspiciously at the grit but continues to drink lots.

My sister, who’s kept chickens before, came around at lunchtime. Vicious was a little perkier than this morning and was walking slowly around the cage. She was able to give a good old flapping and squawking when she was caught for another crop fondle. The crop doesn’t appear to hurt her and it’s not as large as it was yesterday. However, it’s still quite full of fluid.

I read on T’internet that sometimes yoghurt can help with an infection, so I cycled up to our local shop to find they didn’t have any natural stuff. So I had to cycle into town and bought two pots of Yeo Valley Organic Pro-Biotic natural yoghurt. I gave her a tub with some in and she tried the tiniest amount but didn’t seem impressed. From what I’ve read online chickens love yoghurt. But it is new to her so perhaps she’s a bit wary. Anyway, I’ve left it with her and hopefully she’ll try some more. It might help her out.

We have a sickly chicken. We noticed last night that she was somewhat lethargic and had all her feathers puffed out. A quick check of her vent suggested she wasn’t egg bound. We felt around her crop and noticed it seemed large. First thing that came to mind was impacted crop – this is where food she’s eaten gets wound up into a ball and won’t fit through the crop into the gizzard. However, her crop wasn’t hard or doughy as you might expect with an impacted crop; it appeared to be full of water. And she is drinking… a lot!

I’ve done some searching on T’internet and found a few things. Here’s some snippets from this forum.

If the crop is just full of liquid, then it is likely not impacted but soured and needs the meds immediately in order to get the crop working again. Soured crops shut down and thus muscle contractions don’t work anymore, leaving goo to ferment further in the crop, compounding the

Baytril is the drug of choice for a bacterial crop infection… You can try giving her oxytetracycline (which isn’t prescription in North America, but it would be in UK, Europe or Australia, depending on where you live). Oxytet will help, but may not be as effective as baytril.

If there is a yeast infection, the nystatin is by far the best (1 ml/350 g body weight, orally, twice per day). Live culture yogurt will help, but not cure (especially if the infection is severe enough) a yeast infection. Crop infections can be deadly, as they slow and stop the movement of food through the digestive system, eventually starving the bird. There are no antifungals available that are safe to use on birds that are non-prescription… sorry… However, nilstat (nystatin) is not expensive at all.

So, it’s more likely we’ve got a chicken with a crop infection, or a soured crop as they’re called. One way to tell, is to sniff their breath and see if it stinks. I tried this, but getting a chicken to breath up your nose isn’t the easiest of things to achieve. I didn’t smell anything. However, it could still be an infection. This will mean buying prescription drugs from our vet. We haven’t yet needed a vet, so we don’t “have” a vet, but there are a few in the vicinity.

However, this afternoon we will first try giving the hen some olive oil. If it is an impacted crop this, with a little bit of gentle massage, should help. If she doesn’t seem better we will have to look to the vets.

I’ll let you know what happens….

About 3 years ago we started to become more eco-conscious. We started to consider our impact on the world around us through our energy usage and our buying habits. Now that the weather has warmed up a little, it’s time to start taking Navy Showers and while scrubbing myself down I was considering all the other things we have done to reduce our impact on the environment. So here’s a list off the top of my head of some of the things we’re doing. What are you doing?

• Seeing as is sparked this post, let me tell you about Navy Showers. Originally used by the fleet of the Navy to save water, the Navy shower basically involves applying the soap while the water is not running and only using the water to rinse. This can cut the length of time the water is running down to less than 3 minutes. This saves the energy used to pump the water to your house and saves energy in heating the extra water. Although I just have a normal shower, you can get showers with triggers so that you can’t just stand under it unless you hold the trigger down! A further improvement would be to get a low flow shower head (actually ours is pretty low flow, but that’s not by design!) that uses less water but still gives the impression of a full shower.
• Toilet Matters: some people are squeamish about them, but, let’s be honest, it’s just a natural process. When we don’t have visitors (most of the time), Daisy and I are happy to let the yellow mellow. We’re also pretty good at checking whether the other one needs to use the toilet before we flush. Apparently, around about 45% of all water usage in a normal home is flushed down the loo — that’s perfectly fine drinking water. Silly really, isn’t it? I also made a home-made “hippo” out of an old squash bottle and some stones and put that in the cistern. It probably reduces the amount of water used by about 30%. Some might say an improvement would be to get a dual-flush loo, but as we don’t flush the yellow stuff, it would be pointless. An improvement for me would be to have rain-water harvesting system that gathered rain water to flush the loos.
• During the summer the heating goes off except for a short time in the morning to heat the water. The thermostat is turned right down too, to avoid the heating trying to heat the house. This saves us loads of gas throughout the summer. We’ve lagged the hot-water tank which improves the heat retention of the system after the water has been heated. This only cost £15 for the jacket. Other improvements would be to get a better boiler (ours is pretty old and inefficient now) and get a more sustainable heating system for the winter (e.g. geo-thermal heat-pump). Ideally, of course, the house would have good solar-thermal properties, but when you buy an existing place there’s a limit to what you can do.
• We grow our own food. Well, not all of it, obviously; that would require a small farm and all of our time, but we grow what we can. Vegetables being grown this year are: potatoes, beans, courgettes, corn, peppers, chillies, tomatoes, garlic, shallots, squash and lettuce. We don’t have a large garden: just three small veg patches (two about 10×4 foot and one about 4×4 foot). A couple of years ago we also bought some chickens. They produce us eggs everyday. Because they’re the standard battery hen type of chicken, their egg-laying has really fallen off this year, even though they’re only 3 years old. In the previous years, though, they have easily paid for themselves when we sold our excess eggs on. That’s even when they’re being fed on the expensive organic layers pellets. They live in a run about 10×7 foot. Due to the size of our garden, the only improvements we could make would be to dig up what remains of the rest of the lawn and turn it over to more veg!
• We buy local and organic food. Many people don’t believe organic is better for you. Well, so be it. But I really believe it is better for the environment and so I do my utmost to buy local and organic produce. We use an organic vegetable box scheme that delivers fresh veg to us every Wednesday and when we go into town we try to buy at the local organic shop or if not there then at the local grocer. I try to avoid the supermarket as much as I can. I understand they provide a need, but they use their bulk-buying capabilities to stifle competition from small local retailers. One day I might be small local retailer, so I will support them when I can. The biggest improvement we should make is to make more of our own goodies; we’re too easily tempted by ready-made chocolate, cakes and such.
• We buy eco-friendly products. We use Ecover cleaning products for the sink, dishwasher and washing machine. We also use Ecover hand-soap and shower-gel. This is partly because they can be bought in bulk and the bottles can be refilled. We also use natural shampoo (Faith in Nature at the moment). I’m not sure if it’s good or not, but we don’t clean that often either, so it means we don’t use vast amounts of the stuff, although we both shower everyday. We still use the odd non-friendly product here and there (Lime-light to clean the shower-head, for example) and if we were to do grey-water harvesting that would need to improve. We also buy second-hand where possible; this is reuse of a product which is much better than buying new. For example, I’ll always buy on Ebay or Amazon Marketplace rather than from new, if I can. Freecycle is another good place to share things, although I worry a little that the ethos is being undermined by people who just sell stuff on; but at least it’s still reuse.
• We car share. We only have one car between us. When I need to go to work I take Daisy to her work first. I’m lucky in that I can work at home a great deal, so I actually have very little need for a car. We’re also lucky in that on the odd occasion when we definitely need two cars, I can borrow my parents’ car. Of course, all of this could easily be improved by Daisy cycling to work and me getting a job closer to home (I think 32 miles is a bit far to cycle). I’ll tell you now that public transport is basically out of the question.
• We harvest rain-water. Well, we do so in the smallest way possible – we have a water butt that we use to water the veg. This could be improved with more water butts (mine runs out in the summer), and a tank for harvesting water to flush the loo.
• We monitor energy usage with a Electrisave energy monitor. This shows how much electrical energy the house is using at any one time. It is great for reminding you if you left something on and for showing which appliances in the house are electric hogs. In general, I make sure everything it turned off (rather than on standby) before I leave. I should monitor our gas usage more closely. With our old boiler I have no idea really how much energy is uses to, for example, heat the water in the morning. It’s a shame there aren’t more convenient monitors for gas — or are there?
• We reduce, reuse, THEN recycle. There’s still a buzz about how good recycling is for the environment (and of course it’s better than landfill), but it still takes lots of energy to recycle plastics and often many of the plastics that are put in the recycle box are not recycled. We try our best to reduce first: we take old take-away boxes to the butchers when we get our meat, that way we don’t have any plastic bags to throw away; we take our own reusable bags shopping to avoid getting more plastic bags; and we use the veg-box scheme that reuse the boxes the veg is delivered in. When we end up with stuff to throw away, I always consider if it can be re-purposed first: I turn pots in to vegetable plant pots; squash bottles into cloches (or hippos for the cistern); take-away boxes are washed and become useful vessels for meat or excess soup. Only after all that do we bung it in the appropriate recycling box. Plastics and tin go to the council’s recycling collection. Foil goes in a special box that’s given to charity. The cardboard goes in another box and we take that to the cardboard skip down the local dump. Improvements? Reduce those things we have to recycle or *cringe* throw away. We have reduced our main rubbish collection to 1 bag every 2 weeks.
• We compost. We have a peelings-box in the kitchen that accepts all left-over bits of veg, fruit and some kitchen paper. This is then emptied into one of our two beehive composters, or into the wormery. The composters produce, duh, compost in about a year (I don’t turn it so it takes a while). The wormery produces compost and liquid plant feed. Egg shells are crushed and fed back to the chickens as a calcium supplement.

So, last week, before I went for my 10th violin lesson I made my 3rd, 3-weekly video of my violin progress. Here it is:

This post is partly as a reminder to me what my teacher suggested I learn this week. We initially went through some jigs and he suggested I learn “Tell her I am” as it will help get my fourth finger stronger. Then he suggested I try a slip-jig, “Hardiman the Fiddler”. Slip-jigs have a different timing to jigs, but are essentially the same rythmn from what I can tell. We moved on to doing some polka bowing; this is where you bow strongly on the offbeat. It seems quite hard to do. Finally, he even suggested I try a reel. Reels are fast and furious 4/4 tunes. Obviously I’m not up to that yet, but I can start to learn the notes to “The Silver Spear”. This starts with a triplet (or treble) which, in Irish music, has the intention to add a bit of percussion to the proceedings. Matt showed me how to play the triplet such that the bow crunches a little. When played fast it sounds just right. When I play it, it sounds like a beginner crunching the bow! Doh.