Rescue Chickens…with baggage

Have you ever heard that chickens are the gateway drug for Homesteaders?  Well, it’s true from my experience.  We always planned on having chickens here on the farm.  My husband found some plans online to build our own coop.  It was super cute.  Not practical, but cute.  And he built it out of ¾” plywood.  So, it was extremely heavy (as in when we needed to expand into something more, it was hard to even move it). 

We bought some pullets here in town.  Black star hens.  Six of them.  That was July 2013.  Come February 2014, it was a hard winter.  We had been chicken tenders (see what I did there?) for all of 7 months.  We noticed that a neighbor up the road had made a sign that read: “horse and sow for sale.”  The sign went up on our quiet back country road.  And about 5 days later, in the middle of the night, everything was gone.  The neighbor had moved in a hurry, I guess.  The horse and sow and all his belongings were gone.  All except 5 chickens.  I guess he was in too much of a hurry to find homes for his small flock. 

But it was February.  The coldest month in our neck of the woods.  And it was a bad winter that year.  Snow covered the ground atop a thick layer of ice.  So, what were 5 abandoned chickens going to do to survive on their own?  Well, my husband and I decided to rescue said orphans.  But how exactly does one catch a free-roaming flock?  Well, if you ask two city slickers from Florida, the answer to that question involves a long-handled net.  Like the one you use to scoop a freshly caught fish into your fishing boat.  The handle on that thing was probably 5 feet long. 

We excitedly came home from Outdoor World with our “chicken catcher.”  But we thought, “let’s just take some chicken feed with us, and these abandoned chickens will happily run into our arms since they’re surely starving.”  No.  That’s not how it happened.  At all.  We took one stab at using that net, and quickly realized that was not going to work.  And those chickens looked at us like we had come at them with knives.  Back we stalked the next night with some more feed.  There was a small kennel type box that the neighbor had been using for the hens to lay eggs in.  And there were 3 chickens in there that night.  So, we closed the door to it and felt so successfully sneaky.  We brought those 3 home.  But there were still 2 left.  And now they were extremely suspicious of us.  Let me just say that the remaining two were named “Speedy & Gonzoles” for a reason. 

It took another couple night stalks to work out their rescue.  But having caught, I mean rescued 5 hungry, cold, exhausted chickens we felt so philanthropic.  We introduced these newbies to our flock of 6 happy, healthy girls.  And assumed that everybody would become best friends.  Well, one of the newbies was a rooster.  We named him “Rooster Cogburn.”  He was a handsome Cream Leghorn.  After things settled down a bit, we noticed that Rooster Cogburn’s comb was the oddest color.  The bottom half of it was red, and the top half was a funny purple/black color.  That’s what you call frostbite.  And yes, chicken combs are susceptible, just like our fingers and noses.  Further proof that those abandoned chickens really were suffering out there all alone in the elements. 

Soon after all these shenanigans we began to notice how different the rescued chickens’ legs looked, compared to our original ladies.  Their leg scales were all raised and jagged-looking.  Some looked quite irritated in spots.  So, we took Rooster Cogburn to the vet, as sort of a sampling of the problem.  As soon as we arrived at the vet with the rooster, everybody at the vet clinic seemed so surprised to see our new pet.  That seemed strange to us.  Here we are out here in the country where cows and horses and pigs are a plenty.  Why would the ladies at the vet put on such a fuss about seeing a chicken in the waiting room??

Now, to put things in perspective, the average cost of a grown chicken might be $25.  The bill to have such a chicken evaluated at the vet is…..much more than $25.  Meaning nobody had ever taken their chicken to this vet before.  They were taking pictures and giggling and carrying on.  But we left with syringes for all our flock, filled with injections to treat Scaly Leg Mites.  Which is a horrible parasite that is very hard to get rid of.

We were given instructions to inject the anti-parasitic medicine into the breast of each chicken.  Mentally preparing ourselves for this, we had planned to take multiple steps to ensure that we could successfully treat each chicken safely.  We even had a sharps container for each used syringe.  I’d like to refresh your memory at this point, that we were only about 8 months into keeping chickens.  Picking them up and holding them felt advanced to say the least.  Much less, anything involving needles.

And speaking of needles, I am not a nurse, or anyone with injectable experience.  I felt like we were holding needles filled with hazardous waste as far as I was concerned.  Treat it with extreme caution.  But the way we had rehearsed it, my husband would hold the chicken, and I would give the injection.  Then out of the coop that one would go, and on to the next one.  But in the flap of all the nervous chickens, the keeping track of which needles were used, did I uncap the next injection, and who is opening the coop door to let this one out…..I accidentally pricked myself with a needle.

I called my mother later in the day to report on the day’s adventure.  And my opening statement was “well, I know this….I don’t have to worry about getting scaly leg mites, I too have been inoculated!”  Exaggeration, but it was a fiasco. 

In hindsight, our inexperience and naiveté still facilitated rescuing some needy birds, who became part of our flock, and taught us some early lessons.  Do what you can to help others.  You don’t have to be perfectly prepared to lend a hand.  Even if that hand gets wounded and you have to call your mother to confess.