Here’s a revelation for you this week: Chicken poop is really stinky.
Now, those of you who don’t know me might ask how such a piece of information is even on my radar, but friends would not even question it. They’d simply know I’d got myself into some sort of fowl pickle. And they’d be right.
Just like a popular Netflix mini-series, I’m going to build the suspense over time, rather than show my cards all at once.
The whole saga started about two weeks ago. And allow me to preface this by saying that I understand many people on this island find wild chickens to be pests, noisy and destructive. I, however, have taken them to my bosom. In fact, the chickens in our front yard come running up to me every evening for bread, and I’ve even trained some of them to flap up onto my arm. Could ‘America’s Got Talent’ be in the offing? Watch this space.
Anyhoo, it was a Saturday, and best friend/long-suffering housemate Lynne had noticed a teenage bird outside that seemed to be in a bad way. “I think it’s been attacked by another chicken,” she said, as it had one eye closed and what seemed to be wounds around its head.
Of course, I couldn’t leave it like that, so, after scuttling after it like one of the Marx brothers, I finally trapped it in a corner and picked it up. On closer inspection, the poor thing didn’t look good at all. So, I took it inside, placed it in a large cage on top of paper with a bowl of cracked corn and another of water, and called my Chicken Whisperer, Brittany Balli. As I described the crusty growths around its face, she said, “Actually, that sounds like Fowl Pox to me.”
“Well, yes, it is pretty foul,” quoth I.
Ignoring my pathetic attempt at humour, she said it was highly contagious, and the best thing to do was to keep it away from the rest of the flock and make sure it was eating.
“It takes about two weeks to go through its cycle,” she continued, “and then the scabs will fall off and it should be okay. Just watch its eyes and nose holes, because if those get covered up, it won’t be able to see or smell its food, and it’ll starve to death. Oh, and try to use warm water on a cloth to hold against the hard growths on a daily basis to soften them.”
Awesome.
So began my trial-by-fire introduction to chicken care. And, again, I know many wouldn’t have bothered, but when you see what social animals chickens are, and they come running up in that jaunty little style when you appear with food, their adorableness is hard to resist.
In the first few days of nursing, Chicklet seemed to be holding his own. One eye was open, and at least one nose hole appeared to be unblocked. The other eye was completely crusted over. Just in time for Halloween.
I was taking him out of the cage each day and putting him in the laundry sink, using a mixture of warm water and expensive dermatological soap that had been an impulse buy last year, to gently soothe his head. Thankfully, we had a box full of surgical gloves in the house from COVID times, so I had a good supply for the ritual.
By day four, however, he was a bit lacklustre. Brittany, on my umpteenth call for the day, said it was expected that he wouldn’t be terribly bouncy because it was like he had the flu. I was getting nervous, as although there was cracked corn all over the bottom of the cage, I suspected it was from him knocking over the bowl rather than chowing down. I kept worrying that I would walk into his room one morning and find him expired; a member of the choir invisible; an ex-chicken.
It was time to up the ante, so I opened a can of hurricane-supplies split pea soup, mixed it with water, and got out the syringe.
Chicklet was okay with me getting him out of the cage, and I sat him on a towel, which he seemed to enjoy… right up until I had to burrito him, try to open his beak with one hand, and get watery pea soup squirted down his throat with the other. Oddly, he wasn’t keen on this latest development, and started struggling.
“This is for your own good,” I grunted, the Joan Crawford of chicken mothers, as he squawked and tried to squirm out of the towel.
Four syringes of soup later, I figured he’d had enough. I certainly had.
I put the slightly dazed bird back in his cage that night, and hoped he’d still be with us the next day.
Well, not only was he still alive, but he was quite chirpy. He was walking around his cage and cheeping, which I took as a good sign.
I still decided to go ahead with the pea soup routine in the evening, and Chicklet was as happy about it then as he’d been the first time. Both of us wanted to move on from this stage of recovery as quickly as possible, which is maybe why, the following morning, his second eye was suddenly visible. That particular scab had fallen off and his full sight was restored.
As if to prove to me that waterboarding him with pea soup was no longer necessary, he dug into the cracked corn with gusto, and then drank from the other bowl. Clearly we had got through the worst of it, and he was finally on the mend.
Now, you probably think that the saga above is what the first line of my column was all about. In a way, yes, but not like you might think.
Naturally, Chicklet messed his cage, but I just had to remove the slightly dirty paper and replace it with new stuff. No, dear readers, it was the drowning rooster to which I was referring.
While our ward was pulling himself out of Fowl Pox, I walked through the living room and looked out the French doors to see something massive in our pool. I had no idea what it could be until I ran out to find that a fully-grown rooster had ended up in the water. In all the years we’d lived here, we’d never had this happen.
I yelped and fished it out, putting it on dry land. It was cold and shocked, unable to really move. I’d seen similar behaviour outside bars at 2am.
I had to get it into somewhere warm quickly, so I picked it up and conveyed it to our sunroom, which is always the temperature of a Turkish bath unless you turn the air-conditioning unit on. The rooster was making no noises, and it seemed to have a bit of mud in its beak. I tried to clear that out, to minimum objection, and then, even though I was already sweating profusely, got my hair dryer and bathed it in hot air.
The sun would be going down soon, and I didn’t know if it had been injured or was just stunned. I couldn’t leave it in that room overnight, and the cage was occupied by Chicklet, so we put it with food and drink in a guest bathroom. That seemed to make the most sense.
I slept in the next day, so by the time I got up, Lynne was already well into her routine.
“Have you checked on the rooster?” I asked, tentatively.
“Yup. He seems good. But be prepared, it stinks in there.”
Lynne could be a bit smell-shy, so I figured she was probably overreacting. I was too excited about seeing if my loving care had brought him back from a watery grave.
I reached for the handle, flung open the door, and… WHAT WAS THAT STENCH?!
The rooster was happily pecking away at the corn, as though ravenous, which was no surprise, as he had emptied his bowels all over the paper on the floor.
He looked up at me as if to say, “Hey! Whazzup, missus?”
I closed (slammed) the door, completely COVID-ed up with double surgical gloves and an N95 mask, captured the bird, who had very much returned to the land of the living, and transported him outside, tout de suite.
Garbage bags, bleach, bleach, and more bleach later, you would never know there had ever been a feathery tenant in there, but my nostrils were still recovering from the assault. Febreze can’t work miracles.
We released Chicklet a couple of days afterwards, and I’ve seen both him and the rooster thriving in the backyard since. It’s a glorious sight.
I’m so happy that both have survived, and I’ve learned a bit more about how to tend to birds in the meantime. Next time I’ll be prepared.
Gloves, masks, and chicken diapers at the ready. Why? Because chicken poop is REALLY stinky.
Related Videos
