Another Chicken in The Intensive Care Unit

Friday afternoon I came back from work a little late and Tricia had already milked the cows.  Russ was in from college and helped her get the job done.  Ever since the record-setting rainfall we slogged through back in August, it has been drier than the Sahara around here.  Not only has it been dry, but it has been abnormally hotter than in previous years.  As a result, the animals drink the troughs down very quickly.

On the big cattle trough, this is no problem since there is a valve that automatically refills the trough as soon as the cows drink it down. Not so on the smaller water troughs that we have out by the barn. Each day we fill them again, but what happens from time to time is that the chickens will jump up on the rim to drink water and will dip their heads down to get water and they lose their footing and fall into the water.  Inevitably, they do this when no one is around and the chicken will stay in the water all day.  Even in the heat of summer, a hen floating in the water all day affects its ability to maintain its body temperature.  They get hypothermia and if not treated, they'll die.

Russ found a chicken floating in the trough on Saturday and it was mostly dead when he founder her. Russ and Tricia set up an Intensive Care Unit by clipping a heat lamp to the side of an empty bucket to slowly warm up the bird.  When I arrived home, I thought the old girl was dead.  It was laying on its side, wet and lifeless with its eyes closed.  After ten minutes or so, the bird was looking slightly better, but still in critical condition.  We left to go to a high school football game and left the heat lamp on.  When we returned home, I fully expected to see a dead bird in the bucket, but this is what she looked like:

Not better but making strides i the right direction.  Before we went to bed, we turned the heat lamp off as it would be disastrous for a lively bird to knock a heat lamp over and catch the house on fire. When we awakened Saturday morning,  the bird was up, chipper, and alert.  I think she was ready for discharge from the hospital.

I 'wheeled' her to the pasture gate and so as to not rush things, I set the bucket on its side so the recovering hen could exit at its convenience.

After surveying its surroundings and probably being very grateful that Russ snatched her from sure death in a watery grave,  the hen walked out of the bucket and joined her friends scratching around in the pasture.

Things could have turned out a whole lot worse for the hen.  I hope she'll be a whole lot more careful from now when she gets thirsty and wants to wet her whistle.