One recent evening, I was sitting quietly reading a book. My husband, Paul, went out to lock our two chickens in their coop for the night. Within a few minutes, he was back in the house again. “There’s blood in the coop, and all over the roost,” he said.
Just what you want to hear at 8 o’clock on a Friday night.
I followed him outside, stopping at the garage to put on the jacket I wear when tending to the chickens. Paul picked up a can of cornstarch; we’d used it before to stanch a bleeding wound on a hen.
Though we treat our chickens like pets, I wasn’t panicking. I thought the blood was probably due to a torn toenail. When we got to the coop, Nellie, one of our two Rhode Island Reds, was roaming around on the floor, while her sister, Hope, was on the blood-stained roost. I picked Nellie up and saw that she had, indeed, ripped off a toenail. It was right to the quick, too.
I gave her to Paul, who held her while I “applied” cornstarch. Since it is a powder, there is no effective way to do this. I just kept clumping it on. I also said a quick prayer of thanks that this was happening when it was still somewhat light out and the temperature was 70 degrees.
We’d faced chicken emergencies before. The now-deceased white Plymouth Rock hen, Snowy, once somehow managed to cut her comb on the chicken-wire pen. That required the application of copious amounts of cornstarch and then a quarantine until she healed.
Snowy also became egg bound a couple of times. This meant she had an egg to lay, but couldn’t; it was like human constipation but carried the possibility of more dire consequences. We saw her through that crisis, somehow.
Nellie’s bleeding slowed, but didn’t stop. Paul suggested putting cornstarch in a small bowl we reserve for chicken crises and immersing her foot in it. That seemed to make sense. But when I took her foot out to check on it, there was blood between two other toes. Was she bleeding there, too?
I did start to panic a bit then. Luckily, I quickly realized that placing Nellie’s foot in the bowl had caused the blood to spread to her other toes. I ditched the bowl and decided that holding the injured toe, almost in tourniquet fashion, while applying the cornstarch might do the trick.
It did. We were finally satisfied that the bleeding had stopped. I put Nellie on the roost and we went back into the house.
The first thing I did was take off the jacket and my pants, which were dusted with cornstarch and dotted with chicken blood, and set them aside to be washed. After changing, I sat in the living room and went onto my laptop. Paul went upstairs to get ready for bed.
In the living room, our 12-year-old, 80-pound chocolate labrador Quinn was sleeping in his dog bed. He suddenly jumped up. He ran behind my chair and then darted out between my chair and a large planter. Quinn overturned a tower fan in the process. He hightailed it for the kitchen.
I stood up, startled and confused. Was he suffering from a “senior moment?” I went towards the kitchen. Quinn came into the dining room, which adjoins the living room. I smelled something. It was dog poop.
Let’s cut to the chase here. Quinn had an accidental bowel movement in his dog bed, leaving two “items.” He then panicked. He left another “souvenir” when he ran around the planter, and a couple more as he made his way from living room to kitchen.
Of course, since I did not realize what was going on until I got to the dining room, I literally stepped in it.
It was just my luck that I was wearing athletic-style sandals that have a corrugated sole.
By this time, Paul had come back downstairs. He followed me around with a spray bottle of cleaner as I picked up the messes. Quinn stood between the living room and dining room, observing us. It took me several minutes to find all his deposits, as well as places where I had carried poop on my shoes. But I knew my work was done when Quinn went to the door to the hallway and stood at the baby gate we keep there. He was ready to go upstairs, to bed.
This indicated to me that this incident was not the result of any senility on Quinn’s part. He hadn’t had a bowel movement since the morning, and so had an accident that night.
Paul and I weren’t sure we could sleep after all this excitement, but Quinn was exhausted. He was quickly out.
The next day, both Nellie and Quinn were fine. In the afternoon, Paul and I let the chickens our into a secure area where they could free range for awhile. This gave us the opportunity to groom Hope, our other hen.
Hope has a spur growing from the back of one of her legs. This is a bony growth that isn’t dangerous in of itself, but it can curve back right into the leg and cause damage. Once a week, I file down the spur while Paul holds her.
This week was no different on that count. After their time outside the coop and pen, I gave the hens a treat of lettuce and went back inside. Paul was working around the yard. After a few minutes, he came in. “There’s blood again,” he said.
Sure enough, by scratching the ground, as chickens do when they free range, Nellie had reopened her wound. Out came the cornstarch again.
It was looking like I would need another weekend just to recover from this one.
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