Within the world of chicken keeping there's a phenomenon known as "chicken maths" which causes numbers to work in a slightly different way, writes Allie short.
I wasn't aware of this initially and my planned 3 or 4 hens worked out as expected, with Waffle, Twaddle, Fidget, and Maud coming home, but since that time, I seem to have got a bit mixed up on numbers.
4 + 2 - 1 + 3 = 4 surely, as I did say I would be taking on 3, maybe 4 hens but no more than that.
OK, so this chicken keeping thing is addictive and I now have a total of eight hens after Ada, Agatha, and Agnes arrived home six weeks ago, and it has been anything but plain sailing since then. I've had cats my whole life and have successfully integrated literally dozens of new cats / kittens into my feline family over the years - none of them causing as much stress as these three hens.
On the way home with my three new girls, one was having difficulty breathing and I put it down to it being a hot day and the stress of being in the carrier not knowing what was happening. However the next day, it became obvious that little Ada really wasn't well so she went to see the best local poultry vet, Richard Rice-Grubb at the Willow Veterinary Centre in Newport Pagnell.
Richard diagnosed Ada as being very run down and having a high parasite load as a result, so she moved into her own private henhouse suite indoors for intensive care while all eight birds started on anti-parasite treatments.
As Ada gained in strength and confidence, I realised I had created a monster, albeit an adorable one. She followed me everywhere in the house and got her beak into everything!
She climbed into the fridge when I opened it, and even the mop bucket wasn't safe when I tried to mop the floors as she associated buckets with food.
It was very hard work for a few weeks with three separate groups of hens to look after, all needing daily cleaning, watering, and feeding - with Ada also needing daily medication for a snuffly beak, and then Maud got sick.
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Maud has always struggled making eggs. She was the last of my original four to start laying and, even though I gave her a daily supplement to help her, she could never get the shells quite right. Not a problem for me and the soft shelled eggs were a nice treat for my dog, but not good for Maud at all and a couple of weeks ago things got really bad for her when an egg got stuck - the eggs need to have a hard shell to be pushed out and this one was very soft.
Back to Willow vets with an emergency appt. where an x-ray helped diagnose the problem but the egg was too deep inside to be manipulated so vet Zaneta did what she could to try and help Maud pass it herself, and thankfully this happened overnight.
However, this was not the end of Maud's problems as she then developed an internal infection which resulted in a week of antibiotics being needed.
The medication worked well and Maud is now bright and happy again, but I made the decision to get her a hormonal implant to stop egg production for a
few months.
The way these hens have been bred to lay eggs daily, it's not natural at all and takes a massive toll on their tiny bodies as they are designed to prioritise egg laying above all else. Now that the hormones responsible for this have been temporarily turned off, Maud will be able to put all her energy into healing instead of egg making.
It's not been an easy time, but one major positive to come of Maud getting sick is that now all eight hens are living together happily. I had been giving them time together each evening and they had all been sleeping together too, but separated during the day as I couldn't be there to watch them.
When I realised Maud was sick, my priority was getting her the help she needed so the other seven hens were left together unsupervised, and when we got home, they were one happy flock having sorted out their differences and established the pecking order between themselves.
