What are you doing tonight?

[janedoe]

I'm sitting in my living room with the most high strung, aggressive bird I have, soaking her in an epsom salt bath because she's egg bound, knowing full well that if she lays this egg, she'll attack me.

Joy.

What are you doing?

[Snowshoe]

If? What happens if she doesn't lay the egg? Is she in danger? Can you blindfold birds?

[janedoe]

If? What happens if she doesn't lay the egg? Is she in danger? Can you blindfold birds?

It will kill her. The best we can do is keep her as relaxed as possible (hence the epsom salt bath and massage) resting in a quiet place with plenty of warm bedding and easy access to food and water. Low stress. But she's a wigged out bird. I'm surprised she hasn't had a heart attack and died before now.

I was watching a cooking competition show recently and somebody was using a laying hen in their recipe. Beyond stupid in my opinion but there you go. In any event, they wound up using the undeveloped eggs. I was shocked to see that these birds have as many as 14 yolks in process at any given time. Basically, if one gets backlogged or compromised, it is a real problem. In this bird's case, she hasn't been laying, started up again today, produced one egg and now she's in trouble. It can take up to three days to resolve so we'll see.

She perked up quite a bit during the bath (I had to put on gloves) so now she's in the basement and we hope for the best.

[labsnewfy]

I hope the soak and massage works to relax her enough to lay.

[smartrock]

So, what was the outcome?

[janedoe]

So, what was the outcome?

She hasn't laid but she's still alive. Periodic epsom salt baths and calcium, keeping her calm. I wish I'd caught it a few hours earlier but there's always a lot of shoulda, woulda, coulda in these situations. As it is I went outside to check on something else and she was immobile on the ground so at least we caught it.

There's a slim possibility that it's bacterial but the coincidence of her laying for the first time in many months then immediately having this issue is a little too much to ignore. She also made a weird noise when I was massaging her during her last bath so there's that.

[janedoe]

She was very pesky during her morning bath. Did not want a massage and was much more alert. The very encouraging sign was that she was ducking her head between her legs which some birds do when they lay like, "What's going on back there??" She's not hunched in the middle anymore either. More at the back end so that's good. I suspect that the thing got caught right out of the gate and couldn't move smoothly.

Just FYI. Birds can lay all kinds of problem eggs. Hard-boiled. "Leather" eggs that don't have fully calcified shells. Inside out eggs. Eggs with no shells. It will be interesting to see what comes out.

I'm tentatively saying that she'll be OK but I've had about a 50% success rate so I'm not entirely convinced. Glass half full.

[smartrock]

I was watching a cooking competition show recently and somebody was using a laying hen in their recipe. Beyond stupid in my opinion but there you go. In any event, they wound up using the undeveloped eggs. I was shocked to see that these birds have as many as 14 yolks in process at any given time. Basically, if one gets backlogged or compromised, it is a real problem.

Ugh! I'm not sure I'd have kept watching that episode but I can appreciate your curiosity with that whole deal! I learned on Chopped that if you're cooking chicken feet (why would anyone want to do that anyway?) you should trim their toenails. They put some seriously odd things in those baskets sometimes.

[janedoe]

She died.

[Snowshoe]

I'm sorry. I hope she was not in pain.