Hen House Feather Frenzy

Happy Farm Girl Friday!  But not so Happy Hen House Friday.  From the outside, the hen house looks as spiffy as ever.  Hubs did such a wonderful job building it for me.

But it is what has been happening inside that has had myself and hubs so flustered this spring.  My largest hen Esther is a Black Jersey Giant.  She lost feathers this past winter on her neck and back.  Since April marked our first full year of raising chickens, I unknowingly  thought she was molting.  This is what she looks like right now.

You cannot see it but her back and the back of her legs are bare also.  After a lot of questions asked and a lot of reading we thought that we had one chicken that was snatching feathers from the others because within the last three weeks all but one of the girls was messing feathers and not growing any back.  We were told by the farm store to spray Blu-Kote on the irritated areas and seclude the bully from the other hens.

Poor thing, I was feeling very bad about this.  On top of it all she is the prettiest hen we had at the time but the only one we caught accosting the other hens.  We also cleaned out the hen house and started spraying all the other hens with the Blu-Kote which is medicated to help healing.  So we ended up with a lot of blue backed and blue bottomed hens.

 So a couple more days passed and I decided that Esther was just looking too terrible and was afraid I would wake up to a dead chicken so I started making phone calls again.  We live in the middle of farm country and do you know, there are no farm vets anywhere near us.  I was given a different phone number each time I made another call.  There was an office that would make calls for cows and horses but had nothing to do with chickens.  Finally I found a vet that was a couple of small towns over that deals in tropical birds and said he would see one of our chickens. This vet told me that our country is very low on farm vets and it is sad because we do not have anyone to take care of the animals that are being raised for the food on our table.  This was something I did not know and am sad to hear.  Hubs built a carrier and we packed Esther up and I drove her a half hour over to the vet.  She actually rode rather well and just kept up a little chatter most of the way.  Here is the shorter story.  Our hens have feather mites and they were biting off their own feathers.  Ouch.  So five days later we found ourselves again cleaning out the hen house and dusting it and also dusting all the hens.  We have to do this again in a few day time because if there were any mite eggs left on the feathers they hatch in ten days and we need to re-dust.  I was told these mites probably came from wild birds which we have a lot of.    The hen house is certainly going to be clean from getting swept, scrubbed and dusted for the third week in a row.

 Most of my hens are friendly but after all the spraying and dusting they are not wanting my attention.  When they see me coming they only check to see if I have something good for them to eat and if not they keep their distance.  Except Florence, she has always been my favorite and always comes over for a little petting or to get picked up.

Florence

 On a side note it has finally warmed up enough here in Michigan to pot up some flowers.  So far I have only picked up some Pansies and Violas from the greenhouse.

I split a flat of Pansies and Violas with my Mom in Love yesterday.  I love their happy faces.

I want to thank Tilly's Nest, whom I met at a previous Farmgirl Friday for all her help and suggestions on how to help with the hen house trauma.
Scoot over to Farmgirl and Farm Friends Fridays and check out all the fun posts that are being shared tonight.  Wishing you all a wonderful weekend!  Blessings!