Fighting or Curiousness? ..then a dead hen

[tool172]

We have no idea what led up to this.

Backstory. 4 buffs integrated with 3 cochin/silkie mixes and 1 cochin roo. Been over a year now. Came out tonight to lock up the coop and found a hen dead head down in an empty metal water bowl my kid left in a nesting box that doesn't get used. Hen had a feather in her her mouth and was face and feet down in the bowl. Snapped her own neck trying to get out/fight with roo and other chickens? Healthy as an ox and we free range often. We are thinking roo stepped in or other higher order hen fought?

 

[azygous]

How do you know her neck was broken? Dead chickens all have floppy necks. I've had a rooster and two hens climb into a nest together and quarrel with one another, the walls of the nest box splattered with blood from the comb injuries, but none of them were seriously hurt.

Was your hen actively laying eggs? There is a thing called sudden death syndrome. This tragically occurs when an otherwise perfectly healthy hen is deficient in calcium, crawls into a nest to lay an egg, and due to low blood calcium, dies of heart failure as her body draws the last of the calcium from her blood to lay a shell over the egg.

 

[tool172]

I actually haven't thought about that. I feed dumor layer pellets. I'll put out some oyster shell I guess just to be safe. She and another hen went broody for 3 weeks prior. I just let it naturally break since we have plenty of chickens in our flock.

 

[azygous]

Just because oyster shell is provided doesn't mean a hen can't have poor calcium absorption. It can happen from time to time that a hen will not absorb it adequately. There is no way to know it's happening until a hen has a crisis while trying to lay an egg (egg binding). A shell-less egg gets stuck and the hen shows obvious signs of distress. There are no such clues with sudden death syndrome. Similarly, internal laying can also kill a hen suddenly.

You could cut open the abdominal cavity and have a look. Often you can see the shell-less eggs that killed her.