Mulish & Co.

Sour Crop Recovery: She Lives!

Our girl, Hazel, has made a full recovery, from what exactly, I don't know. It started about three weeks ago with sour crop and morphed into something else entirely. I suspect that she developed sour crop from eating all of the timothy hay that I used to fill the nestboxes. I couldn't get straw and I don't like to use wood shavings so I picked up timothy hay from a pet store. It didn't help any that I had never made grit available to the birds. Birds don't have teeth to break down food. Instead, they eat grit which rolls around with the food and works as a rough equivalent for teeth.

How did I know she had sour crop? A few days after she gorged on the hay her crop became soft and squishy and huge. Her breath was wicked wretched. I cannot emphasize just how foul it was. When I jiggled her crop you could hear the fluid sloshing around. She threw up a lot, probably close to a cup that first day. Looking back on all of this, I'm surprised I didn't drop dead from the sheer horror of it all.

The sour crop cleared up with a kefir-yogurt-green tea only diet for 2 days. I also had to manually empty her crop which I won't go into here. There seemed to be some slight improvement but then she began to have weakness in her legs, she was wobbly and stumbling, lost her appetite, continued to lose weight and at it's worst, her eyes weren't "right". A trip to the vet that I work with and a few x-rays ruled out an obstruction or tumor or egg binding but showed what looked like polyostotic hypertosis. I won't even pretend to know what that is. It's something with her bones. They look mottled. How's that for vague? "It all goes back to the ovaries," the radiologist said. They also gave her sub-q fluids and that seemed to make her feel better for a day.

I put her on the antibiotics that were recommended but did not keep her on them for as long as was recommended. I used it for three and a half days instead of a full week. She was depressed being in isolation and her appetite improved when I let her rejoin her flock. She was still stumbling and tripping for several days. I kept waiting for her to give me a sign that it was time to cull her, instead, she began to get better - her drinking and eating kept improving, she stumbled less. I made sure she was getting water by giving her watermelon which she absolutely loves. And tonight, for the first time in three weeks, she ran full throttle towards me from the far end of the yard when she saw that I had a fistful of collard greens for her. She even gave one of the Sussex a sharp rap on the head when she was tearing into the collards. The lady is back!

I know this is a recap for anyone that's been reading all along but I can see that there are people finding my blog by searching for help with sour crop so I thought I'd post this summary of Hazel's illness. Again, I'm not sure how the sour crop spun out of control. One of the doctors theorized that she may have had low potassium or calcium levels and that made her stumble. I think that adding apple cider vinegar to her water and putting her on a kefir & yogurt diet helped immensely. They neutralize the ph in the gut and crop.

It took a good three weeks for her to recover but you'd never know she was down by looking at her. She hasn't laid any eggs since all this happened and I don't know if she ever will. Our other Buff Orpington has quit laying already and she's only 2 yrs old. The Sussex and Delawares are our strongest layers. But you can't beat an Orpington for friendliness. They are The Ambassadors of The Backyard Chicken. Long live The Ambassador!

A Poem

I couldn't have come across this poem at a better time. It was in todays Writer's Almanac. If you don't subscribe to Writer's Almanac, do! It's very often the first email I read each day. There is always something interesting to be learned. It's a great way to start out the day.

Passage

by John Brehm

 

In all the woods that day I was
the only living thing
fretful, exhausted, or unsure.
Giant fir and spruce and cedar trees
that had stood their ground
three hundred years
stretched in sunlight calmly
unimpressed by whatever
it was that held me
hunched and tense above the stream,
biting my nails, calculating all
my impossibilities.
Nor did the water pause
to reflect or enter into
my considerations.
It found its way
over and around a crowd
of rocks in easy flourishes,
in laughing evasions and
shifts in direction.
Nothing could slow it down for long.
It even made a little song
out of all the things
that got in its way,
a music against the hard edges
of whatever might interrupt its going.

Wherein The Mule Rants

This does not feel like a short work week at all. In fact, each afternoon that I go to work, it feels like two shifts back to back. Aside from the regulars who call daily to give an update and detailed description of their pets fecal matter and habits of defecation, we've had a high number of poor planners looking to board their pets on short notice. Word to the wise - you can never reserve kennel space too early.

I feel like I am overloaded with "superficial" information, information not really meant for retention or absorption (just info meant to get me through the day and to perform specific tasks) that by the end of the day I feel completely depleted. So much of it just pings off the surface of my brain.

At a certain point it all seems so absurd. I had a customer call to say she was about to plant lantana. This, I thought, will be a lovely conversation. In a fleeting second I thought about all the colors it comes in and how she was bound to see more butterlies in her garden. A friend, at last, in a sea of canine ailments. But what she wanted to know was if the lantana would be toxic to her dog. Yes, the doctor said, lantana is toxic to pets. When I shared the information with the client she said with relief, "I'm so glad I called! I'm not going to plant it then. Thank you!" So pleasant, so sweet, so...completely disappointing.

Maybe my dogs have just mastered the art of identifying toxic plants but they've yet to poison themselves with my daylilies or lantana. Not that I have much of either but they are more likely to gravitate towards grass or chicken poop. Yes, they get bellyaches, yes they throw up but I'll be damned if I'm going to garden around them. It's survival of the fittest around here, natural selection, baby. We see more animals in the hospital for eating socks and panties than we do for ingesting toxic plant material but I've yet to hear any of our clients exclaim, "Well, then, I'm not wearing socks or panties anymore. I'm glad I called!" I don't know, maybe all of our clients are sockless and walking around au naturel underneath and I just haven't noticed. I am quite often in my own little world.

*For a short list of plants known to be toxic to pets, click here.

 

Sad Tiger

Sad tiger at bus stop on Oak Springs

Going, Going, Gone or The Sudden Departure Of A Guinea

Gone. Vanished. Our guinea girl, our dear La Bête has gone missing. I was so preoccupied with Hazel that I didn't notice La Betty packing up her bags to leave. I feel deeply sad about this. I loved that bird. She showed up one day out of the blue. I mean, she was just there, in the yard, hanging out with the hens as if she'd been with them her whole life.

I only know that she came up Delano Street from the south then she climbed the little hill to our yard. She was like some eccentric aunt. Michael was immediately smitten while I was overcome with curiosity. Never in my life had I seen a guinea yet I immediately knew what it was.

La Bête makes a horrible racket - a two toned honk that can be followed by what sounds like a a shelf full of pans and skillets clattering onto the floor. The noise was abrasive, it made me shrink and feel conspicuous that such a sound was coming from our yard. You never knew when she was going to belt one out. She's a lovely bird though.

We noticed that she'd left, no note, no nothing, on Wednesday when I was locking up the coop. I'd just given Hazel her medicine, offered her some food and put her up for the night. Michael noticed first, asking if I 'd seen La Bête. She was there in the morning and she was there, I think, before I left for work. The guinea has not missed a meal since she moved in so I thought she'd return for dinner. That was not to be.

Thursday morning I checked for her straight away. She wasn't there. I wanted to call in a missing persons report but imagined the conversation:

"I need to file a missing guinea report. Her name is La Bête. She looks like my aunt, wears a funny hat, has beautiful brown eyes and wears a spotted lavender coat."

"Ma'm, if your aunt from guinea, the ol' biddy you call her? If she hasn't been gone for at least 24 hours we can't file a missing persons report"

I opened my windows in the morning while doing my morning meditation and I could swear I heard her call from far away. It was so faint and sitting in meditation I simply acknowledged the sound - "Guinea call" - and let it go. Poof, gone. It may not have been her at all, it could have just been wishful thinking. Speaking of which, I wish Beagle were trained to track or even to point in the direction of the birds' departure. The poor thing just looks confused when I ask her, "Which way did Betty go?" She wags her tail and lowers her head. No pointing, no sniffing or tracking a trail.

I think to myself that she may come back. She may just show up for dinner or breakfast. She could be sitting on a nest somewhere or out looking for love. And then I think to myself, maybe this is a warm up to what seems more and more like the inevitable loss of Hazel. Maybe this is just a tinge of the pain of attachment that I will feel when dear Hazel marches on.

It's lousy, the pain of loss. But I wouldn't trade the feeling that I get from the companionship of animals for anything. The outward flow of compassion and love that comes with the tending is satisfying if even for a moment or two. I want to say it's too brief but it's everything even in its brevity. So maybe, as short as it seems, the time we have is just long enough.

She's Beautiful And I Love Her

Our first tomato of the season.

Purple Cherokee, 7.35oz

Hazel Takes Her Medicine And The Tomatoes Taunt Me

Hazy has had her third dose of cherry flavor SMZ-TMP antibiotic. I'm no chicken but I can imagine that my little hen doesn't associate plump red cherries with the syringe full of pink yuck coming her way. She fights it, turning her head left and right, up and down. I manage to get her beak open (no small feat) and squirt a bit in at a time, being careful not to drown her with the stuff. I have yet to see any improvement but we only started it yesterday. Time will tell.

 

When we're done, I put her down to stretch her legs and peck at strands of grass. She's unsure on her feet, wobbly. She takes slow and deliberate steps through the grass. I let her be and turn to survey the garden. The tomatoes are unruly. They make me want to abandon them but I can't. I imagine selling the house with this tangle of tomato vines. Would it bring down the property value or would the new owner reap the reward of my efforts? Both probably. The Cherokee Purple has taken to using a cane and a walker just to stand upright! If I could only stop myself from checking on the clusters of green tomatoes I'm sure I would be rewarded with a surprise of purple tomatoes one day.

 

The love the beans shower me with makes up for the spiteful sunflowers and hollyhocks and the ever stubborn tomatoes. Beans love me and I love beans. We will be friends forever. The longshot at the end of the movie about my life won't be of me walking across a prairie into the sunset, no, it will be me walking through a field of bush beans with an overflowing basket of the things slung over one arm. It will be a poignant end, maybe a chicken or two will dash across the frame. But hey, it's not over yet! I'm not going anywhere until I get at least one tomato from at least one of the 8 plants that are taking over the backyard.