I have always been a worrier. In recent years, I’ve learnt to curb the habit of worrying about things that just may not happen.

But yesterday afternoon little Cynthia was not well, and it worried me a lot. I didn’t sleep so well. What had happened was that she withdrew herself and would spend ages sitting with her head in a bush, looking rather listless, hunched, and doing the occasional diahhroea. We gave her some oyster shell to nibble on, which she seemed to do with some enthuasiam at first, before going to stand under another hedge or shrub to look listless again. She drank a little and wandered around, but seemed like she was in her own little world.

Overnight she laid an egg where she was perched and then for the first couple of hours she plodded about, hunched and tentative, not wanting to eat at all. Having let her out, a couple of hours later, I got up again to check on her. As the girls heard me coming through the gate, all of them, including Cynthia, came barrelling out of the hedge, looking eager for the cheese cubes that I had brought them. They were all gobbled up, and it seems that all is now well. I’m hoping that it was just a dicky tummy or the heat as far as Cyn is concerned…I’ll keep an eye on her to see how her next egg laying venture goes.

But for now the status quo seems to have been restored at the Smallest Smallholding.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 7:26 am and is filed under hens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.