The first thing you’ll probably notice after a predator threatens your chickens—they all disappear. I mean absolutely all of them and I mean absolutely disappeared. Still and silent—not a cluck, feather, or a shadow to be seen. This was what we found on an afternoon in October 2021. Where the girls had all just been running around, they were all suddenly nowhere to be found.
That’s when we knew something was off and started our looking. Under everything. In the most unreachable and unpleasant locations. Like we’d done many times before. This time was nearly the worst: we found our sweet Lady huddled on the ground, with dear Frecho (Lady’s sister-friend, maybe more) standing beside her in solidarity and fierceness. I could almost hear Frecho saying, “Over here! I have been protecting her and you two need to take it from here.”
Lady didn’t make a move when we reached down to pick her up. Her breath was rattling and sputtering like a 50-year smoker with pneumonia. She had a massive gash up the back of her neck about 1.5′ x 3′. There was a puncture on the right side of her face (thankfully not in her eye) and another under her tail. Half of her beautiful tail (normally way upright) was missing and what was left was folded down into the very-unhappy-chicken posture.
In summation: she looked and sounded real bad.
S. pointed at a nearby tree and as he did a massive red-tailed hawk flew off. It was waiting, probably, for the girls to come back out into the open, especially with one wounded. But we got there first and we both kindly cursed the hawk as it departed.
When we first found Lady, I was worried the lesson in this chicken emergency was going to be how to put a chicken girl out of her misery, permanently. Knowing how my mind works, S. looked at me and said, “It’ll be OK.” I liked his outcome better than mine and decided to get on board with this thinking, with a quickness. It’ll be OK.
We brought Lady inside and did our best to clean her up. We doused her wounds with hydrogen peroxide then gooped them up with Polysporin.
The insult to injury was that she had been enjoying a hearty dust just before the attack and she was “holding,” the word we use when chickens hold dirt in their feathers after a dust bath, before taking a big hearty shake. Think of it like a deep conditioning treatment, that you keep on your hair for thirty minutes or more, then rinse out. Lady was holding at least a quarter pound of dusty grit in her belly and “petticoat” feathers. She felt terrible and she looked terrible. And if you’ve met Lady you know, she likes to look good.
We quickly assembled our bathtub ICU:
- a large plastic storage tote – lidless,
- cushioning / nesting with an old cotton towel
- two small (endlessly tipped over) containers for food and water
- a heater on low, to keep the room warm but not to overheat
- heavily curtained window, for darkness and greater rest
Then we hopped on the interwebs, seeking an endless feed of stories, blog posts, or forum threads titled “Our Chicken Lived Through a Hawk Attack—Here’s How.” No such luck. There were a few tales of bad-ass old roosters that took on raccoons or tractors, but nothing about a hen that had been (literally) in the talons of death and lived. I think we made a quick trip to the nearest dollar store for more chicken healing supplies, because we’d discovered that baby aspirin was the only for sure pain treatment for chickens, in microscopic doses.
S. had a show that night and, though I knew I would be a little distracted, I was happy to go out and stop fussing over Lady. Let the poor girl could rest, already! Cleaned up and tucked her into her chicken isolation and healing ward, we’d given her a micro-dose of aspirin, via some strawberry slivers, because as you can see in this video, Lady loves berries. There just wasn’t much else to do.
I didn’t make it through the night without a trip home. A 20-minute drive each way, to close up the other chicken girls at dark, something that could wait until we got home and to just quickly check on Lady. She was fine, still breathing a bit rattly, but much quieter and calmer than when we first brought her in, and she was still alive . . . which is what I was really checking on at that point.
The most wow-inspiring moment that night, and maybe through her entire healing journey: We got home well after dark and (of course!) immediately went to the bathroom to check on her. Her rattly breath was nearly back to normal. She was quiet and breathing. Maybe she got up to be coaxed into a few bites of food or we wanted to give her a dash more aspirin, for some reason she stood up, and there tucked in the towel under her was the most perfect, still-warm, slightly bluish-white Lady egg.
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In the days that followed, we regularly applied more Polysporin to her wounds. Of all her wounds, the one on her face took the longest to heal, and she itched it quite a bit, which didn’t seem terribly helpful. I read somewhere during all of this, that hawks’ talons can be rich with bacteria, given all the killing and tearing apart they use them for. I think Lady’s cheek was infused with some of this bacteria and this is why it took so much longer to heal.
Through the journey of Lady and the hawk we learned a number of super helpful things:
- Gentian violet does not help a chicken heal in the company of other chickens. It stains the chicken a very bright colour for a very long time and when other chickens see the bright purple blotch they want to peck, peck, peck it! It may be anti-bacterial, but choose other colourless methods.
- When a hen is healing from serious injury it’s best not to reintegrate too soon. We tend toward the “keep them in the flock wherever possible” approach, but when they are still suffering and weak let me save you from being horrified to find that the hens you thought were allies will unceremoniously beat on the wounded chickie girl when she’s down. Save your hen, and yourself, the stress and reintegrate her when she’s at least 80% recouped, when the threat of the pecking order will be her inspiration to thrive and not make her a target for terrorizing.
- If a hen is eating, drinking, and pooping, she will probably be OK. If she is eating, drinking, pooping and preening with a little gusto, she will almost certainly be OK. If your hen stops laying and is still pooping that’s probably OK too. Lady stopped laying for several weeks after the attack. Her body immediately and wisely directed its energy to healing and feathers and rest.
- Living through this with Lady showed us that chickens know trauma. For a few months (maybe more) following, when any tiny threat (esp. airborne) was posed, Lady would sprint to hide herself under cover and cower while her sisters would look up, shrug, and carry on ranging. Lady was shutting down for a time: still, silent, and small. I mean, how would I feel if something almost three times my size swooped down from the sky and tore into my body with sharp talons wanting to eat parts of me for lunch. . . how long would it take me to get over it?
- Chickens are way tougher than you might think. They can survive and thrive through a lot more than might seem possible.
When I was a kid we had a lot of animals: chickens, rabbits, cats, dogs, and even turtles. Every so often one would be injured or sick. Sometimes a wild bird or lizard would be found post-cat or post-window. We’d bring the creature in, tuck it into a shoe box, and try to offer it relief. My mom felt that these animals needed time to dig deep and heal or just let go. She believed they could decide in a way we that we human animals are unable to. I agree with her, and I think that if these non-human beings can feel our love and care for them and it gives them a little more data when considering how deep to dig in these tough times.
Lady is now absolutely back to her plucky, rambunctious, and sometimes ornery self. It took her about three months to really be back to it, and she did. As I type this, she is strutting in front of me, giving a bunch of guff to the other hens trying to eat up at clover treats that their Aunty D. brought over today. Lady is telling each of them where to go and how to get there. After last winter’s super molt her tail is in fine shape, perhaps its finest ever and she’s re-crested with her glorious pompadour. Lady is a small golden queen and a warrior.