Puffy The Hen

I just check the hens and noticed some yellow legs sticking up in the air in the middle of their big pen. On closer investigation it appears that it’s Puffy. She’s the lighter colored Golden-Laced Wyandotte, the one that got her name for “puffing out” so comically in cooler weather last year, when it first came to be cooler.

None of the hens in that pen have laid an egg since August, molting, molting, molting, all of them older than a year. So I’ve just let them go. My Australorps weren’t laying either, but have been the last month, so I was hoping it’d start any day now for the older hens. Now we are down one brown layer.

WhenPuffy did lay an egg it seemed she was the weakest layer, meaning she didn’t lay very often from how well I could judge it. Seems she didn’t lay her first egg until into September 2003, when her hatch-mates were laying in July and August, and then production of those 4 would be fine if it wasn’t for Puffy, well, three brown layers and one green layer, the green layer proved out decently good production due to the color of her eggs, spot on hers and no one elses.

Taking the three brown layers into consideration then, if signs that I had when I had my finger on the pulse of how laying was going … extrapolate that with the actual egg totals and figure that the two other brown layers were laying about even with the green layer, and Puffy wasn’t laying even every other day. I’m fairly sure that’s the case. Can’t PROVE it, of course, with a basic flock setup 😉 But overall it seemed that it’s the case: Puffy was Below Par.

So she’s gone now. Why? Don’t know. She looked fine on Saturday and Sunday, when I was out in the yard. On Saturday I was working on their “winter quarters” and making headway. I was hopeful with good weather we’d get it done this week. But it was yucky on Monday, yesterday, and today as well, more rain. So I didn’t go out there yesterday at all, sent the children to feed the hens. I just so happened to go out this afternoon since they hadn’t been fed in the morning due to the heavy rain, and it was not raining so I went out, balmy temps of near 70 degrees F, and all that, went out barefoot (oh delight of December in GA! Warm now, cold, cold, cold soon, then warm, then chilly, etc.) I was really shocked to see that bird bottoms up. She looks to have been trampled, and no doubt was. I saw the Australorps trampling over their fallen friend some time back when one of them died overnight suddenly. So in a pen with Flighty Whiteys and some Big Pushers I can venture to imagine the scenes of running over poor Puffy quite often in the last day, or since she fell and didn’t get up.

Sad, yes. But she’s the best one of the four Wyandottishes to go. :sigh: