Poor Wonkey has the sneezes…..she was also making a horrible sound last night when I went to put them away, kind of croaky bark, I was quite alarmed and had a moment of ‘eek, shall I isolate her from the rest incase she has some horrible infectious disease’. I rushed up with a large box intent on putting her in the shed for the night, only to find that she was perfectly happily perched in the house snuggled between Chicken (formerly known as The Other One) and Scaredy. So, I decided to leave her – slight hyseteria possibly, but having only had the chooks for 2 weeks I’m reluctant to have a death on my hands already! This morning we trooped off to the vets (is amazing how difficult it is to find a farm-type vet in this part of rural-ish Wales), to be met with a perfectly nice bloke who admitted that he knew very little about chickens. But he did know that she was incredibly bunged up and has got ‘flu’. Poor Wonkey. So, we now have a little bottle of Baytril and a syringe and have to administer it to her twice a day. I’m tempted, having read lots and lots of chicken/cold/baytril advice on various poultry web pages to start putting it in the water after she’s had a couple of doses, so that the others get some benefit too. Hmmm, we’ll see. I’m going away for the weekend and I can’t imagine Steve will be enormously impressed with the idea of having to administer drugs to a chicken twice a day! I’m also going to start the chooks on pro-biotic yoghurt to help them grow good bacteria whilst the antibiotics are around. Alas, the medicine means we can’t eat the eggs for a couple of weeks, but if it means the chooks stay healthly and live on to lay for a long while to come then we can cope without eggs! Not that we’ve had that many yet anyway, but they are only about 20 weeks old.
It’s been an expensive couple of weeks for animals – Harvey had to have his teeth cleaned and various blood tests last week, costing £200! But, it was worth it as he’s completely fine again now, phew. I thought we were going to loose him for a while there.
Right, off to make some pumpkin soup and watch the rain!
