I have an alarm set on my phone to make sure that The Girls are all accounted for and I lock them in for the night. I always talk to them and they answer back. Tonight I tucked all the Little Girls in and then went to the Big Girls. Head count and I find Susie laying all spread out in between the nesting box and the roost floor. Her eyes are still open but she is not breathing. Just this afternoon I saw her sitting in the sun and I even pet her. She seemed fine. Another chicken mystery. I will be looking thru all my chicken books for an answer. She was eating well. She was being bossy. She was in the middle of a molt. None one the Big Girls have laid for days. I thought it was due to the molt. Could she have be egg bound? It was cold the other night could that be it? She wasn't over weight. So now she is resting beside Keithetta in our little chicken cemetery.
If anyone has any ideas please leave a comment.
This is waht I have found so far...from Mother Earth News
This is waht I have found so far...from Mother Earth News
Causes of Sudden Chicken Death
Apparently, it’s not entirely uncommon for this sort of thing to happen.
Heart attack: Sudden death is a pretty well known syndrome among fast-growing broiler chickens. The birds die with a “short, terminal, wing-beating convulsion” and often flip on their back. The cause is a heart attack. Recent research suggests the heart attack is triggered by stress; the chickens seem predisposed to heart attacks because of microscopic lesions in the muscle of their hearts.
Egg-bound: Layer chickens can die if a fully-formed egg gets stuck somewhere between their shell gland and vent. Possible causes: the egg is too big, there is injury to the reproductive tract that blocks the egg, or the chicken has hypocalcemia (calcium deficiency). Overweight chickens are prone to getting egg-bound. So are young hens that are pushed to lay before they’re fully mature. Egg-bound death isn't sudden; there are signs that a hen is egg-bound and a few steps you can take to move the egg. However, the blockage often isn’t discovered until after the chicken is dead and owners can be caught by surprise.
“We all got to go sometime”: Accidents happen. A chicken could ingest something poisonous. One bird could jump down from a high roost on to another bird. Heck, a chicken could just run into a wall too hard. Once I had a chicken get a single toe stuck in the edge of the coop loft and hang upside down for a couple hours before I found her. The bird was fine once I got her unstuck but the point is: weird accidents happen.
How important is it to find an answer when a chicken suddenly dies? That’s completely up to you. Like with all things chicken-related, it comes down to paying careful attention to all your birds. If you have reason to suspect contagion or disease, or notice abnormal behavior in other chickens in the flock, get the dead bird examined immediately. If the rest of your chickens keep doing their happy chicken things as normal, maybe it’s not a high priority. As one chicken owner put it: “Where there’s livestock, there’s deadstock.”
The only unsettling thing about having no obvious reason for the death is there’s nothing concrete you can change or improve as a matter of prevention and protection for the rest of your birds.
