A pullet lays her first egg at the age of 20 to 24 weeks. It takes a few hours longer than a day for the germ of the yolk to progress through the oviduct, get surrounded by more yolk, then white, then get enclosed by the shell and finally dropped into your nesting box. This process works like a conveyor belt. Even as the first egg is being laid, another is getting made and is working it’s way through the oviduct. Sometimes the first egg is missing the yolk, or the shell, or is a weird shape or teeny tiny. Often, the first few eggs are huge. This can cause prolapse (check my blog archives for a story about one of my hens that prolapsed and and how I saved her). Sometimes, especially with new layers, an egg gets stuck. As you can imagine, this is not comfortable for the hen! If she’s moving at all, she’ll be lame. Since the egg shares the same outlet as the digestive tract, she won’t be able to expel manure. She’ll be miserable. She’ll die if that egg doesn’t come out.

If the egg is far along in the tract, you might be able to feel the stuck egg. Slather vaseline on a (gloved) finger and feel up her vent. You might be able to reach the obstruction. Try to grease it to help it along. Pour some olive oil down her throat (I use a syringe that came with children’s cough medicine.)

It might be stuck further up and it’s just guess work that she is egg bound. The hen’s discomfort, lack of poo and no appetite are signs to look for. Another clue is a sore bottom.

I had a hen that looked like this:

Eleanor’s bottom was red, swollen, hot and had feather loss. This is more extreme than you usually see with egg bound hens. My guess is that an egg broke inside of her, and led to an infection.

To this day, I don’t know for sure if she was egg bound, but she responded to the same treatment used for that problem. Egg bound hens should be soaked in a warm bath to relieve pain and relax the bottom to ease the blockage through the oviduct. I like to add epsom salts to the water. Dilute according to the package directions.

Here is a photo of Buffy getting a sitz bath for a similar illness:

It looks like she’s enjoying the soak, doesn’t it?

Next, because Eleanor was hot and her skin was red, I started her on a 10-day course of baytril, a powerful antibiotic (I had the pill form, which gives a more accurate dose than dissolving antibiotics in water and hoping that a sick hen is drinking enough.) Pry open the beak, place the pill as far back as possible and tickle the neck to make the hen swallow. Easy!

I used a plunger syringe that comes with infant medications to pour two tablespoons olive oil down her throat.

Unfortunately, nothing came out the other end, and she still wasn’t eating or drinking

So, I mixed a teaspoon of epsom salts (the cure-all for toxins) in a half cup of children’s pedialyte (electrolytes.) Unfortunately, the only pedialyte that I could find at the store was cherry-flavored. Which, it turns out, is very sticky and if it gets on your skin turns it dyes it bright red. Next time, I’ll use latex gloves! Anyway, using that plunger syringe, I poured this mixture down her throat. Not as easy as the pill. What a mess.

All of this was effective! Later that day, Eleanor passed a huge, normal-looking poo. I fed her freeze-dried meal worms that I had on hand for the bluebird feeders. They are very high in protein, and easy for her to digest.

She missed her best friend, Edwina, so although Eleanor still limped and her skin was still pink, I put her back in with the other hens. Later that day, there was an egg in the nesting box that looked unlike any egg I’ve ever seen. It was dark brown (I don’t have dark-brown egg layers) and had raised black specks on the shell. Was this Eleanor’s? Had she passed her stuck egg? Was this egg stuck behind a broken egg that had caused internal damage and an infection? I’ll never know. She never laid another egg, but has survived another few years.