Steel Kitten

Oxo has infectious bronchitis :-(

Just when I thought it was safe to clean the bathroom.

Oxo had to be brought in today in a terrible state. She went downhill so fast. Martin said she was a little subdued when she came out of the coop this morning, but nothing to be alarmed about, and by the time I saw her this evening she was terrible.

She has bad respiratory problems, heaving and gasping for breath with a wet chesty rattle and her whole face is puffed up and swollen. She can barely open her eyes. I've managed to make her comfortable, given her some fluids, vitamins, and some painkiller/decongestant which I'm hoping will take the swelling down a bit.

Tomorrow I will pick up a huge vial of medicine from the vet, which he assures me will do the trick in one huge dose. I hope so, she's my favourite and being the boss will be dreadfully missed by us and the other chickens if she goes.

We got her in 2008 when she was about 20 months old, so she's nearly six now. That is incredible for a battery hen and I can't believe she's going to end up done for now in such a horrible way.

She has eaten and drunk which is good, and she's still quite alert and fiesty. I just hope she can relax with all that panting and get sleep tonight until I can get that medicine into her.

I won't get a wink of sleep now knowing she panting in there like that.

Animals. They just break your heart don't they.

EDITED AT 23:09: She just had a heart attack in front of me and died.

:-((

Rest in Peace you little tea stealing moo. We're glad you were with us for so long.

I've burnt my nose

 

After swiping the skirting boards with varnish first thing this morning, I pottered outside in the sun with the intention of drinking a cup of tea and half-heartedly pulling the odd weed until I could go back upstairs and fit the skirting to the wall.

Oh dear.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Eight hours later I came in at 5pm absolutely knackered!

Yep, somewhere between drinking the tea and and trying to walk back into the house, my brain made my feet turn left instead of right and I attacked the garden.

I filled my green bin with brambles in less than half an hour and I still have another week to go until it is emptied by the council so the rest of the huge pile at the bottom of the garden will have to wait until then.

I made further inroads into cutting the grass, first strimming as it was so long and then mowing on the highest setting. The chickens are now sporting an attractive green layer in their chicken pen to rootle out the bugs and tidbits from.

Elevenses for me and a warm seat for Fleagle. Like a hobbit, Fleagle had already consumed breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses and brunch by 11:30am. You can see her thinking about her forthcoming lunch...

I cut the grass inside my greenhouse, laid down weed suppressant membrane and piled in some stones. Once the industrial clingfilm arrives, I'll be almost ready to put in some tomatoes.

Before: lots of scrubby grass, and my red, white and blackcurrants and a vine in middle. Each currant plant has its own comfrey plant as a soil nitrogen fixer. I also chop off leaves and lay them round each plant to decompose and release nutrients.

After: grass strimmed then membrane and stones laid down. Two more bags are needed to finish it.

I cut back dead growth from last season's perennials and piled them up to go in the shed for kindling.

I was almost at the end of giving Marybelle a beakicure (a manicure for beaks) as hers was starting to hook over and make picking up grain tough, when suddenly I ran out of steam. Literally, bang. That's my lot. My face was burning just like it does when I get really run down.

Realising I had seriously overdone it I cursed my stupidity all the way back to the house, expecting to see it was around 2pm. Nope, it was almost 5pm.

I'd been out all day in the hot sun with no food or fluids since midday.

I drank a pint of water, scoffed an emergency salmon bagel, then ran a deep bath to scrub myself clean. I carefuly applied ointment to all the various cuts and bumps a good day's gardening usually sustains, including several head lumps (one from a tumbling compost bin that I swung the wrong way and headbutted) and one head cut from smacking it on the shelving rigging in the greenhouse (that's coming down asap).

It was then I noticed my face in the mirror. It was bright red and my nose resembled a Belisha Beacon.

I actually felt a bit relieved - what I thought was chronic fatigue exhaustion was actually normal tiredness from dehydration and the hot face because I was burnt rather than from a dodgy immune system.

Hoorah!

So I'm sitting here now in front of a halogen heater (because I have those chills you get when you've had to much sun) trying to find a cheap watch to wear in the garden so I don't do it again.

Tsk, tsk. No matter how old I get, I never learn.

Most amusingly, Fleagle and Georgie are asleep on the other sofa.

The boundaries are drawn

Until I put the cushion between them, they had both spent the better part of 10 minutes hissing, snapping, growling and generally trying to outstare each other in competition for the whole sofa.

Children eh?

Loving the sun!

I was desperate to get out into the garden and the sun today. I haven't really been out into the garden at all this year, apart from a bit of remedial leaf sweeping and gutter clearing, and the grass desperately needed cutting. It was up to my shins, but I had to leave it dry out a bit in the sunshine today before I could do it.

So, I finished off painting the bedroom. We're both so chuffed by the colour, it seems to suit it no matter what time of day or light you look at the room. So, all that has to be done now is skirting boards (which I'll be varnishing and fitting tomorrow), a new windowsill, the lights and sockets fitted, radiator back on, carpet and curtain pole. Not long now ;-)))

Finally at 3pm I made it outside for the first of several cuts the grass will have. Along the way, I finally maaged to see some of the prettier aspects of the garden that were struggling to make themselves known in spite of the appaling weather lately. The strawberries are flowering...

...the rhododendron...

...the pear tree - yet again promising a mammoth crop...

...the feathery stems of the dill...

...bluebells...

...the nitrogen fixing comfrey, which is enormous and the bees are loving it...

...and finally my favourite, purple sprouting brocolli...

...especially when they're on my plate for dinner that night.

Finally couldn't resist this picture of Georgie in the chicken pen. Every evening we leave the pen door open now so the cats - both our's and the neighbour's - can get in and hunt mice. Georgie has taken to wandering in and checking out the potential for a night's hunt during the day. The mice tend to hide under the dog kennel (you can see the hole they have chewed through in the floor) so he waits, has a sniff, a walk around, another bit of waiting, to see what will pop up. And yes that is carpet! The pen got so waterlogged recently I resorted to covering the worst up flooded bits with carpet to keep the chickens' feet a bit drier and less clogged uncomfotably with mud.

Unfortunately, wirth everything I was doing today I slightly twisted my knee and I've gone all weak and wimbly in that leg!

A bit of elevation and ice does it wonders so it shouldn't be with me for that long.

The bathroom is ours again...

I haven't been up the end of the garden much lately. The chicken dramas of the last few weeks has seen me get only as far as their pen and nowhere beyond, so it was with amazement and a bit of shame really that I hadn't seen my rhubarb patch in all of its splendour before this morning.

And the only reason I did see it was because I was on the hunt for a few fresh dandelion leaves for Marybelle to eat while she is in her temporary residence outside. Yes!! She is finally out of my bathroom, where she seemed to be getting quite depressed and bored, and is now back in with her friends, albeit in a smaller closed off run for a few days. Why? It's become clear that she is being ruthlessly bullied by Oxo and I suspect is the reason why she became ill. She was too scared to eat anything because Oxo has taken to patrolling the food bowls and stopping her.

We have three bowls of layers pellets in corners of the pen, and their treats and afternoon grain gets broadcast far and wide precisely to stop this kind of thing, but it appears that Oxo has put the fear of God into Marybelle to the point where she has become paralysed with fear when she's around, even if she's on the other side of the pen. That's why she's been so ill. She was literally starving to death.

So, yesterday Martin had a brainwave. In the afternoon while I was at work, he took Marybelle up to pen and enclosed her with food and water in the run area of an old coop we no longer use. She was very excited and perked up straight away - tail up and happily scratching. Oxo was apparently furious and patrolled the perimeter trying to get in. When he went out a few hours later, Marybelle was quite clearly distressed again, with Oxo still patrolling the perimeter. He opened the run door to pick up Marybelle and immediately Oxo shoved her way in and tried to be nasty. It wasn't a case of showing her dominance - I've seen that before when I've introduced or reintroduced chickens to the flock - it was literally beak and claws out to cause maximum damage to Marybelle and we won't tolerate that. The pecking order is one thing, but trying to maim and kill another chicken out of spite because she's weaker is something else.

He picked up Marybelle and Oxo started jumping up to try and peck her while he was holding her. One quick shove and Martin had Oxo in the old coop run with the door shut. Then he put Marybelle down and immediately she ran off with her tail up to find her friends Lulu and Dusty. All three greeted one another and then troted off happily into the wilderness area for a good scratch together, well out of eyesight of Oxo.

Oxo, now a prisoner, was beside herself with rage at the turn of events. We took Marybelle back to the house at dusk and let Oxo out, and today we'll do the same thing as yesterday so Marybelle gets to eat in peace and then play with her friends.

Really Oxo has made the decision for us about what to do for the future. We now have to have two flocks - one with Marybelle and one with Oxo. So we're on the hunt for a packing crate to make a temporary henhouse and trying to decide how the split will work. I'm in favour of keeping Lulu, Dusty and Marybelle together, and buying some new chickens - preferably nice big girls that can square up to Oxo - for Oxo to boss around.

That's of course if Oxo remains as the dominant. New girls mean new challenges for leadership and Oxo might not be able to maintain her position as top hen.

Leeks and Lemons and chicks

Let's have some nice news first shall we?

Started eating the leeks this week, a bit late as they're supposed to keep you going during the winter, but I planted them late and I didn't feel they'd reached maturity. The Mammoth variety sure lived up to its name - they were huge! Two of them chopped and lightly sauted with cracked pepper and thyme made a massive delicious vegetable side dish. Very yum!

And check out these lemons! I have 11 in total coming on and more flowers are trying to set!

I've been waiting for months for this little lemon tree to grow some lemons. Every flower it produced fell off, no matter what I did, so in the end I settled for mostly ignoring it over the autumn and winter, chucking on some water once a week along with a bog standard citrus feed. Lo and behold, it seemed to like it. I think I must have killed every lemon tree I ever owned due to over care, probably over feeding and watering. I'm watering once or twice a week at the moment depending on whether the conservatory has been mostly cool or mostly warm during the week.

Finally, chickens. Hummmmm...Lulu is still outside with the others. She's had all her antibiotics and I'm checking her crop and abdomen every other day and watching her carefully in between. She's still swollen but it is subsiding and she is eating and pooing ok.

Marybelle is a whole different story.

I brought her into the bathroom two days ago. - she was cheaping, not eating, but subdued and straining on the nest yet producing nothing. Her abdomen was not swollen, but she was clearly distressed and wanted to lay. So I figured she either had an egg stuck or she has infectious bronchitis and a common side effect - big cysts on her oviducts - makes her think the weight in her abdomen is an egg so she strains to lay. Or it could be neither of these and she has a tumour of some kind.

So this was her three hours ago in a warm bath of epsom salts, sugar and a relaxing blend of essential oils of Lavender, Geranium, Petigrain and Clary Sage. It was more of a hope that it was a stuck egg and the bath would help her relax and pass it.

If you are squeamish look away now.

Ten minutes ago this is what I found on the floor; a folded egg shell.

She's looking much more alert and from looking at her back end now, there's more to come out. I can see a distinctive spherical shape under her vent, so tomorrow morning if she hasn't passed it back into a warm bath she goes.

Happier animals

Poor Fleagle.

As if her bowl being empty for brief periods of time wasn't suffering enough ;-), this morning she was pounced on for a darn good groom.

Every other morning she gets a quick once over with a standard cat brush, but this week it was clear that the spring moult was underway for all of the cats and the brush wasn't cutting it and Fleagle, being long-haired, needed help. She has sprung so many mats over the last week despite the quick morning grooms that it was clear her normal brush, her Furminator and a shaver was needed to tackle her coat.

Fifteen minutes after Martin and I got hold of her, she was bereft of some of her undercoat, all of the mats on her back end were gone and she's had her back end fur washed. She may feel a little drafty, but it's better than being matty and smelly (and she does start to whiff come spring!).

So one animal here feels a little more comfortable now, but she hasn't had her underside done yet ;-)

I think there is another animal feeling a bit more comfortable than she was. Lulu has had all of her antibiotic jabs and her swelling has gone down slightly. Only slightly though. She's eating and her crop appears to be emptying properly so I'm very cautiously optimistic about her future, but until that swelling goes away I won't be 100% happy about her future.

Still on watch and wait with that one.

Just lost Georgia

Just lost my darling Georgia-belle. Towards the end she was so ill and this wasn't any kind of sour crop I've seen. It was like every scrap of fluid was seeping into her crop from her body tisssues and threatening to drown her. I kept drawing off the fluids from her crop with a tube and syringe and within 20 minutes of doing it the crop was filling up again. And it wasn't noxious smelly stuff. It was straw coloured syrupy fluid that had no smell. In the end I was down to subcutaneous injections of water where her wing joins her body, but it just got absorbed and went straight in her crop.

I can only think it was acites, which is the fluid left behind when the blood squeezes through blood membranes and the blood cells get left behind. This can happen as a result of congestive heart failure or liver failure. Her comb was gradually getting more and more blue as the days went by, and cyanosis is a symptoms of congestive heart failure and ascites syndrome.

We buried her in the middle of my vegetable bed in the sapce where yesterday I took out the pond, and tomorrow I will construct a rock memorial just like Bisto has.

But as if to break my heart even further, I went into the chicken pen today and noticed that Lulu, despite having had antibiotics last week, has now developed a penguin waddle and a swollen abdomen just like Georgia-belle. I've just given her a massive dose of antibiotic and she's still very lively, but then so was Georgia before she crashed out.

My vet is due back from holiday on Thursday so I will be asking for a blood test to determine which type of IB it is. The most infectious new strain, IB QX, only had a vaccine developed for it in 2010 so there's every possibility our girls were not vaccinated against the new strain, only the old which is only about 70% effective against IB QX.

I'm hoping against all hope that I'm not about to lose all of my chickens one by one.

Dispatches from the bedroom and sick room

The lowest point of the bedroom makeover for me - dodgy electrics, terrible plumbing above the floorboards instead of under, blown paster and rubble everywhere.

Well hello there. It's a bit of a misreable wet morning here and instead of lying in on one of the two days I'm not in the office I was up at 6am bleary-eyed supping tea.

The last few days of my life has only been about two topics - the impending wallpapering session due to commence in the back bedroom and Georgia-belle being hideously unwell again.

Let's talk about the nice stuff first.

Rather than do a load of freelance work over the next four days I have decided to get as much done on the back bedroom as I can. A couple of days ago I found six rolls of Graham and Brown Wall Doctor lining paper (specifically for walls that have minor plaster issues) stuffed in the back of a cupboard. I don't even remember buying it, but it must have been over five years ago as that was the last time we were wallpapering anything! I worked out the dimensions of the room and amazingly it needs 6.3 rolls. Now, I didn't bother subtracting the area of paper that covers the window and door, just factored in straight drops, so I may not have to buy any paper at all. If I do, it will be just the one roll. Wall Doctor paper is paste the wall, so that will speed up everything, and it's paintable.So a bit of a win for me.

All I have to do today is give the ceiling its second coat of paint, take off two more small pieces of skirting, knock holes in the plasterwork to recess the two plug sockets and I'm ready for papering.

Result!

I've decided that I'm going to buy a Farrow and Ball estate emulsion for the room, probably Parma Grey, in the hope that the chalky finish will help disguise any areas of imperfect plaster that the lining paper does not.

Source: Farrow and Ball

Now granted, it doesn't look like the most exciting colour in the world, but because I will be having red and green in the room I don't want a strong colour on the walls.

So that's where we are so far. I still have to source a curtain pole, the overbed lights, and the flooring, and do a makeover on a pine wardrobe, chest of drawers and blanket box for the end of the bed, but I'm really liking the way this is starting to come together. I can now see clearly how all that hard work, which seemed so thankless and boring over the last year, will produce a room that will look fantastic.

And which I will want to transfer to sleep in immediately!

Now, the chickens. I mentioned sickness again. This time Infectious Bronchitis. The chickens have managed to pick up Infectious Bronchitis (IB), presumably from wild birds as now new chickens have been added to my flock, and have gone off the lay. Georgia-belle in particular has suffered badly. She's swollen up to enormous proportions, possible from peritonitis or perhaps cysts on her oviducts, and has swung from having an impacted crop due to a huge volume of body fluid preventing anything going through her digestive system, to sour crop which is now poisening her.

IB is a virus that just has to sort of work it's way out, but in the meantime it can cause secondary infections so the chickens have had antibiotic injections all week to make sure. While Geogia has had hers - and a lot more than the others - she was quite far gone when we realised and went downhill quickly. However, she was still very bright, peeping a lot and showing interest. After a week in my bathroom on medication, the swollen abdomen is recceding but she's come down with sour crop. She's so sick, very weak, eyes closed all the time and is battling horribly.

I'm keeping her warm, getting as much of the fluid and rubbish out of her crop as possible without distressing her too much and getting some anti-fungal medication and nutrient solution into her. It's all I can do until she either recovers or it's clear I have to step in and stop the pain and euthanise her.

Sour crop? Or canker?

The patient being kept warm

Just come back from the vets after Georgia-belle took a turn for the worse and another diagnosis has been offered - it is sort of sour crop, but not caused by impaction. Instead it could possibly be canker.

The similarities between the two are uncanny, but in the case of canker it is caused by an organism - a trichomonad - that is spread between birds through saliva. It can come from pigeons that drink at the same place as your chickens - the organism leaves the mouth of the bird and swims away looking for the beak of another bird to get into.

It then causes lesions to form somewhere between the mouth and the crop, often increasing in size until it blocks the food from getting down. I always assumed that the lesions started in the mouth and have seen some terrible pictures of mouth sores, but it's not always the case. 

My efforts to empty her crop have been fairly dismal since Tuesday when I really thought I had her fixed that morning. There was nothing to massage or break up as far as I could tell - and now I know why - and she just kept on throwing up liquid. Logic says that it could be one of two things; either her crop is in stasis and isn't working at all or she has a blockage. So I had massaged her to stimulate her crop and encourage the contents into her main digestive system but nothing actually going in so it has to be a blockage. Even water wasn't getting through in any quantity.

As wild birds drink from my chickens water bowl,there's a chance that she has a canker nodule which has grown in her crop and blocked off the access to her gizzard.

We cannot be absolutely sure of this of course - it could still be a blockage somewhere else caused by a lump of undigested matter or a small tumour - but the vet could feel nothing in the bottom of her crop or along the entire length of her abdomen, and because trichomonas is contagious it's the best place to start.

So twice a day I have to put a tube down the back of her throat to her stomach and pump in 2mls of Flagyl (metronidazole).

And Saturday morning I've got to give my girls a shock when I open the coop, extract them one by one and throughly check their crops. Because if Georgia-belle has it, it's too big a hope that they've all escaped it. 

Georgia-belle gives us a fright

 Oxo when she was ill with the same thing that Georgiabelle has - sour crop

Sorry it's been so quiet here lately.

Georgia-belle has been one exceptionally sick chicken over the last few days and its taken a lot of my energy to get her to turn a corner and begin to recover.

I found her on Saturday morning looking extremely ill in the corner of the pen. I hadn't even picked her up properly before she had thrown up evil smelling liquid all down the front of me, which made the diagnosis easier. Sour crop. And judging from how frail she feels she's been hiding it for a long time.

She's in our downstairs bathroom at the moment and I'm using the old dependable plant propagator to provide heat underneath her while she recovers. I've spent a while trying to get all the foul smelling liquid out of her and massage her crop, but last night she was so bad I had serious doubt of her making the night and was considering euthanising her.

That's a decision I haven't had to make yet about any of my animals, but I had to admit she was so poorly I couldn't see how she could recover and feared I was making her last moments hell.

The problem wasn't grass as far as I could see, so my immediate actions of oil and crop massage didn't really do a great deal to move anything. She was just full of water and at the base of her stomach foul black sludge. I have no idea what the sludge was, but it seemed that the bacterial/ fungal/ parasitic load from this evil stuff had simply stopped her stomach working or perhaps it had reached such a high level in her stomach food couldn't be digested or get through the opening to her true stomach. Whatever it was it wasn't mixing well with the other stuff in her stomach so had just sat there forming a dense rotten layer.

Anyway, last night she was as sick as I've ever seen an animal. Again and again she just kept throwing up - she threw up down me several times and I couldn't pick her up without this disgusting stinking liquid seeping out of her mouth. She was rasping and heaving for breath. Her wings were hanging limply, tips down, by her side. Her head was lolling forward. Each time she was sick she got weaker and desperately thirsty, so I had to feed her pipette after pipette of water with apple cider vinegar in it. Every hour or so I gave her a half a ml of a special nutrient solution for sick chickens in the hope she could absorb some into her bloodstream through her mouth membranes in the same way we do with some drugs. I started giving her natural yoghurt by pipette. By 9pm she was still alive, very weak and very thirsty but the vomiting seemed to have stopped. I gave her a good few mls of fresh natural yoghurt, so anitbiotic and anifungal medicine and tucked her up warm in a bed of fleeces for the night with a towel draped over her, making sure her head was propped up so it couldn't tip forward.

Then I went upstairs, took off my ruined shirt covered in black and brown vomit stains, and crawled into a very hot bath and got rid of the stinking rotting chicken food that had ended up in my hair, down my chest and all over my arms, hands, legs and feet.

It was in the bath I made the decision. If she hadn't improved at all this morning, if she was still being terribly ill and weak with fluid dribbling out of her mouth, I would euthanise her.

I opened the door to the bathroom this morning at 5am unsure of what I would find. I heard the sound of a little 'peep-peep' first and behind that was a slightly perky chicken. Her crop was finally empty. I mixed her up a combination of oats, grated apple, scrambled egg, mashed potato, honey and yoghurt, which she tucked into, along with her medicine on a couple of pieces of egg which had to be 'helped' into her (she does not like her medicine!). She had a wander round, a little 'peep-peep', drank some water and went back to bed. I put down a few spoons of beed cat food on a saucer and left her there for the day in the warm to rest and sleep.

I wonder if she knew how close she came?