Our chickens don't have Covid. Or the flu. Or any other ailment. But we do have one hen that is in quarantine. The reason is strange. The other birds were cannibalizing her. Chickens can be bad about that. If one gets picked on and blood appears, the other birds will peck and peck at it. We found this poor hen with a hole the size of a golf ball between her back and her rear end and a bunch of feathers missing to expose her pink backside. Blood everywhere! I thought that she was a goner.
We put her in the chicken tractor by herself to get her away from the cannibals. She survived! In about a week the wound mostly healed up. We set her free. Lo and behold, the same thing happened again. It's as if we had Hannibal Lector in the barnyard. We put the poor hen back in quarantine. She's been there for a couple of weeks. You can see that new feathers are growing in to cover her exposed rear end. You can also see the hole. Gruesome.
She is free to talk and socialize with the other chickens while quarantined in the chicken tractor, but they cannot get to her through the (appropriately named) chicken wire.
Since her injury she hasn't laid an egg. I don't know if her egg laying mechanical infrastructure is still in place or if it has been damaged. Tricia and I were just discussing yesterday what we were going to do with her if she doesn't lay eggs anymore. I told Tricia, within ear shot of the injured hen, "We'll just put her in the freezer and eat her if her egg laying days are behind her."
Well look what was on the ground in the corner of her quarantined enclosure:
It's either the first egg she's laid in weeks OR she heard my comment about butchering her and paid one of her hens on the outside to smuggle in a contraband egg.
Either way, we'll let her heal up for another week or two and finish growing her feathers in to completely cover her wound, and then we'll re-release her into the general population of hens. Hopefully, this will result in a favorable result.
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