A death in the family

Well, we lost one of our chickens. Let me reframe that, one of our chickens died. If I am against using euphemisms for the death of people, I need to follow the same policy for our animals! Little hen didn’t have a name. We used to name our chickens and we gave the rooster a name (Lyle) and the first hen we acquired we called Julie (for Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts) but when we added the other two hens who looked exactly like Julia, we didn’t try to name them since we couldn’t tell the difference. When we had backyard chickens in the city, we had little leg bracelets to distinguish them, but we just never bothered with them.

We have battled with leg mites with these guys for quite some time and recently Lyle started making a raspy noise when breathing that makes us think he might have lungworms. Our neighbors came up last week to help us out by treating them and mentioned that one of the hens was very underweight. A few days later, I went out to lock them up and noticed she was under the hutch instead of in it. When I picked her up to put her away I was shocked by how underweight she was. She felt like a skeleton! For a few nights, she kept not going in the hutch at night and had to be placed in it. In retrospect, we think she was just too weak to get up the ramp.

I am out of town babysitting my grands and yesterday Randy called to say the hen had died. It was sad but not surprising. They were all rescues and we have no idea how old they are. I guess we’ll have to have a chicken funeral when I get back home. :-(