I guess that it is a good thing that I am going back to school for Nursing next fall or this spring, because I seem to be doing a lot of first aid lately. On Saturday our chicken complex acquired 5 more laying hens. These lovely ladies are spending the winters with us and the summers at the near by Bible Camp that I work at in the office and used to be the Program Director of. The ladies have a summer residence by the campground and Tree House Village, but no where for warmth in the winter, so we invited them to stay with us.
When they came to camp they had recently been picked on by a rather nasty roo as I was told, so they were all missing big areas of feathers on their backs. Over the course of the summer, two of them (Lady Cluck and Phoebe - we named them that) regrew their feathers. The other 3 have not and I am suspicious of Lady Cluck and Phoebe being bullies. Once a chicken has a weakness, others tend to exploit that, we here on our corner homestead have never experienced chicken bullies before. So I went to the store and bought some vapor rub (this is a sure fire remedy according to my sister) and lathered up Red, Camilla and Baaky's backs. Chickens don't like the taste of vapor rub, why would they? Ish! So far, the redness on their backs have gone and we will keep up the treatments and hope that before the snow flies we will have some feathers on these lady's backs.
These 5 new ladies do need to learn that it is best to sleep in the coop at night when it is so chilly. Saturday night, they didn't do this and were dancing around on chilly feet Sunday morning. Last night the kids and I corralled them all into the coop and locked them in for the night. Hopefully we won't have to wrangle them again tonight.
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