The Early Bird (Sometimes) Gets the Worms

Our flock of laying hens are mis-named, because they are definitely NOT laying. Yes, they are molting and yes, the daylight hours are shorter, and yes, there is not a plethora of bugs and clover out in the pasture for them to eat.  But they should be laying some eggs.  Tricia was doing some research and found that there is a possibility that our birds could have picked up some parasites.

Although we try to almost NEVER use medications, when the need arises, we'll do what we have to in order to restore health to our animals.  A veterinarian friend of ours told us what we needed to do and sold us some wormer for the birds.  Here comes the tricky part - each bird must be administered about 1 cc per pound.  So we had to weigh the birds, but first, we had to catch them.  This is easier said than done.  I had a plan.  We called them into the barn while throwing some "chicken scratch" on the ground in the barn until every last one of the birds was inside.

As the birds were busy eating with their heads down, I quickly shut the gate, capturing them inside.

We weighed the first bird and squirted 4 cc's on a torn up piece of Evangeline Maid white bread.  I picked up a hen and gave her the bread.  A strange thing happened, though.  She didn't want to eat it.  I grabbed another bird, but this one wouldn't eat it either.

Time to move to Plan B.  I picked up each bird, weighed her, pried open her beak, and Tricia squirted 4.5 cc's down the hen's throat.  We repeated this process a number of times over the next 2 hours.

After Tricia administered the wormer to each bird, I would place her outside and grab the next "patient."  Tricia put a tick mark on a scratch piece of paper to count the birds.  We have always thought that we had 65 - 70 birds roaming around on the pasture.

While we might be good census takers, we are horrible at estimating crowd size. Our estimate of 65-70 birds was way, way, way off...

Instead of having 65 birds, we actually had 119 birds, including 111 hens, 6 roosters and 2 guinea fowl. Our little flock is a lot bigger than we had anticipated.  So after 2 hours had passed, we had de-wormed our entire flock except for 14 that we ran out of medicine for.  We tagged the leg of each of those and we'll worm them later.

Hopefully after worming the old gals, they'll begin to lay eggs for us.  If not, I may be forced to try a trick and old-timer told me.  He said, "Get a hatchet and go out to the hen house and grab the first hen you can catch.  Chop off her head and butcher her right there in front of the others.  The other hens will be frightened and will start to lay eggs so as not to meet the same fate as her old headless friend." With an accurate count of birds, this also helps us determine that we are feeding them the correct amount of feed of 1/4 pounds of feed per day per bird.  We'll keep you posted to follow up on our parasite prevention protocol.  Stay tuned.