Unsecure chicken perches

[Pete66]

I have just had a rather horrible experience and thought I would share it to see if this has ever happened to anyone else.

 

I am a newbie to keeping chickens and took delivery of 6 lovely hens a few weeks ago. We bought a second hand Eglu Cube on Ebay which I have been very pleased with. It has the built in run, but we have located it in a much larger homemade run. One of our chickens has been under the weather recently and has not yet started to lay. She has been coughing and wheezing, and the guy I bought the chickens from gave me some medicine to put in their water.

 

Mid morning today I went to have a chat with the hens and noticed immediately that only 5 came running up to the gate. The one missing could not be laying I knew (it was the poorly one) so I immediately thought the worse had happened. However, it was a lot worse than that. I found her dead,she was under the Cube with her head stuck through the tiny gap that the wheel lever goes through. She was still warm but obviously dead. I could not believe that she had managed to get her head through the gap and it was incredibly difficult to extract her, I had to turn her whole body around and try to line her head up in just the right way to squeeze it back through. As you can imagine it was extremely distressing and, whilst I would have liked to have got there earlier so I could have tried to save her, I imagine it would have been devasting to be struggling like that with a live bird.

 

Is this a one-off unfortunate accident, or is has anyone else experienced similar? She was the smallest bird and I can't believe that any of the others would be able to fit their head through, but I have now done my best to block off the gap using a log.

[The Dogmother]

Sorry to hear that.

 

I recently had a chick do a similar thing in their eglu run, despite there being kickboards all round it to stop them doing just that. Luckily I caught it before it died, or the cat ate it, and it's fine now.

[LJ's Chooks]

oh what a tragic experience.

 

a similar thing happened to us last week, but fortunately had a happy ending.

 

I went to put ours to bed and found that Root had got her head stuck between our fence and gate post, and was dead ... or so i thought. I got in the pen and tried to get her out. She was well and truely wedged and lifeless, but just about warm.

after some quiet distressing manouvers between her and the gate, i got her out. she was lifeless in my hands, i had my little moment and was saying good bye and devastated. All our other girls had taken no notice and were happily tucking into the bowl of food that i'd put down on the floor in horror when i saw her. I gave root a cuddle and stroke and after a couple of minutes she got up and ran to the food without a care in the world or concern for how distressed i was!!! I could not believe it. she had shown no signsfor about 10 minutes by then and i was sure shhe had a broken neck judging by her position!!!!

 

I thought it was cats that had multiple lives, but i was amazed!!!

 

Those chooks never cease to surprise us.

 

You may want to just drop a note to the lovely boys and girls at Omlet HQ, cos i cant believe this is the only instance, and they may be able to add it to their updates list.

 

so sorry about your news though!

[Olly]

So sorry to hear that. I have never heard of this happening before, and given the number of Cubes sold then I think there would probably be other reports on the forum if this was a frequent occurrence; I think you have just been very unlucky and this was a freak accident.

 

It would be a good idea to drop a line to Omlet though, as suggested. So sorry to hear of your loss, it's very upsetting to lose a hen, whatever the reason.

[Pete66]

Thanks for the feedback. I have notified Omlet as suggested.

[Plum]

Sorry Pete66 that must have been an awful experience.

 

LJ's your story is amazing. I can see you with your mouth open. What a relief for you.

[Pete66]

I notified Omlet as advised and received this reply:

 

"Thank you for your email and for your post on the forum.

 

I was sorry to hear about your unlucky experiences, having read your account of what happened it sounds as though this must have been a freak accident as we have not had other reports of a chicken becoming trapped like this within the structure of the housing. Please do continue to monitor the situation and if anything like this happens again please do let me know."

 

So, definitely sounds like a freak accident then.

[The Dogmother]

I have to say that I've never had, nor heard of a full grown hen doing it before. Mine was just down to a daft chick