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  1. Melancholy Bear

    Soft shells, shell-less, now vent oozing

    Also, can they swallow huge tablets or do you cut them up small?
  2. Melancholy Bear

    Soft shells, shell-less, now vent oozing

    So I was able to hold her while my wife checked. She cleaned her up, probed and found an obstructed egg that hadn't come out. She was able to help her push it out. The egg was super-hard. She tends to lay large eggs and she's sorta skinny, so she will probably tend to have more stuck eggs. It...
  3. Melancholy Bear

    Soft shells, shell-less, now vent oozing

    I will try to feel it tonight. What am I feeling for? Diet is layer pellets, with occasional snacks of fermented grains Not sure about the crop and how I can get to her in the morning. I see she's drinking a little right now, so that's good.
  4. Melancholy Bear

    Soft shells, shell-less, now vent oozing

    We have a 2-year-old buff orpington who has been having egg problems. First it would be soft eggs, then shells with no eggs, then shell-less eggs. Now she is oozing yellowish White from her vent, and it looks swollen. She won't eat or drink currently, very lethargic. Comb color looks red still...
  5. Melancholy Bear

    Comment by 'Melancholy Bear' in article 'Six Tips On Breaking Your Egg Eater'

    What worked for us was specifically putting a squirt of lemon-scented Joy detergent in blown-out eggs, rubbing some Joy over the outside of blown-out eggs, adding full-height dividers between nesting boxes, adding curtains over the entrance to the nesting boxes, checking for eggs every 2-3 hours...
  6. Melancholy Bear

    Comment by 'Melancholy Bear' in article 'Egg Production and How to Get the Most from your Laying Hens'

    Is it okay to feed layer feed if there is a rooster in the flock too?
  7. Melancholy Bear

    Is our rooster making our hens suffer?

    I decided to blunt his spurs and nails. But I can't catch him. He is too cautious and too quick. My coop is also not one where I can walk into and snag him off his roost. Any ideas?
  8. Melancholy Bear

    Is our rooster making our hens suffer?

    Thank you for all your thoughtful replies. It's a lot to think about. Here are some photos showing his relative size and some of the feather loss.
  9. Melancholy Bear

    Is our rooster making our hens suffer?

    We have a rooster mating with five hens. He is much larger than them. His spurs have caused feather damage to the backs of a couple of his favorite hens, to the point where we bought chicken saddles for them. After even more time, he has caused the removal of feathers around the sides and backs...
  10. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    The only unscreened holes are at the edge of the lapped siding boards and sides of the R-panel metal roofing, and an egg will not fit through them. Here are some photos. p.s. The golf balls have never disappeared.
  11. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    Reappeared in an adjacent, different nesting box. Three have gone missing. Some time passes between the placement and disappearances, a few days at least. First one missing was real and one of three marked with a hash. (At this time, my thought was a snake.) I removed the remaining two and...
  12. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    No, they are roughly 32-inches off the ground. The floor of the coop is 24-inches off the ground. Nesting boxes are 8-inches above the floor of the coop.
  13. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    Real
  14. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    The coop has hardware cloth floor, so no shavings in the main area. Minimal shavings in the nesting boxes.
  15. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    My coop is up off the ground and I have carpet tack strips everywhere to prevent animals climbing. Any openings into the coop are much smaller than an egg size. It's possible a snake could eat an egg and digest it and get back out I suppose. But one could not eat a ceramic egg and get out
  16. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    We have no children and my wife is as stumped as me. I had a trail cam directly above the nesting box with the marked eggs. The images of the eggs were mostly obscured with the hens. I thought one was being eaten until a ceramic egg disappeared.
  17. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    That's extremely unlikely here. We are very rural. And I've had a trail cam on the coop also.
  18. Melancholy Bear

    Missing egg mystery

    We have five hens and a rooster. We very rarely ever collect five eggs in one day. Mostly we get two, three, or four eggs. We usually let the chickens out of the coop for a couple hours before sunset. They return to roost every evening. A couple months ago, I marked three eggs and left them in...
  19. Melancholy Bear

    What is causing this back feather damage?

    She wore the saddle for less than a week. Today she somehow got out of it with it still snapped. I bought the one from The Chicken Chick, which had the elastic straps and snaps. It will be tiresome if I have to put it on very often.
  20. Melancholy Bear

    What is causing this back feather damage?

    Update: the saddle arrived yesterday and we put it on her, not rather gracefully last night. Today will be her first day wearing it. Thanks for the advice. While the rooster's spurs are not terribly long or sharp compared to some pictures I've seen on here, would trimming and blunting his...
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