That’s disturbing.
Every day the boys and I stop at Landlady’s to check up on her chickens. We haven’t missed a day since they arrived. And usually everything’s peachy. But two times there were unexplained casualties. Several weeks ago a hen broke a leg for no apparent reason, and this afternoon I found one dead.
There are four milk crates in the big chicken house, laid with straw in hopes that at some point the damned things will finally start laying eggs. In that corner there’s a sheltered place where the smaller hens often congregate. While I was futilely checking the nesting boxes I found one of the smaller hens dead in that corner. Wasn’t there yesterday, but it had been dead some hours. I couldn’t see any injuries. and I hope this doesn’t mean there’s illness in the flock.
Probably not. If it was a virus or something, they would likely all be infected at once and you’d have more than one go down. Lots of things can go wrong with chickens, and finding one mysteriously dead is not unusual. I had chickens for a lot of years and found my share. 🙂 Nobody can accuse you of neglect, by any means.
Yeah, Joel. It happens. And it’s often the smaller ones it happens to. Last time I had chickens, there was a little one with a slightly malformed beak. I was surprised at how well she was holding her own despite obviously not being able to eat as efficiently as the others. Then one day — dead. Hey, they’re just chickens and that’s just chicken life.