And there was much rejoicing!

Good news! Dolley's impacted crop is entirely better. The medication from the vet (Metoclopramide for those of you just tuning in) must have worked. This is entirely due to Scott's persistence--I have been very busy with work and hardly able to look up, while Scott has been chasing Dolley around the garden with little droppers of medication.

Today, quite suddenly, her crop was empty and back to normal. We hope this mysterious mass will move through her system OK, but not to worry, I won't be analyzing her poop online here.

But that's not all the news. Just as her crop was clearing up, she's started to get broody! (A broody hen, for hormal reasons, sits and sits on her nest in the vain hope that her eggs will hatch. It's bad for the hen because she might not even get up to eat or drink, and it wreaks havoc with the use of the nesting boxes.)

A couple days ago I saw her sitting in her box around 9 am, and again at 1:30 pm. Don't know if she'd been there all day, but she was certainly sitting on her egg, Abigail's egg, and the wooden egg (more on wooden eggs later.) She did hop right up to seize the opportunity to free-range, but I wondered if this was the start of an episode of broodiness.

Today Scott noticed her sitting in her box for what seemed like an unusually long time. He finally kicked her out of the box, with some protests from her, and she laid an egg right in the doorway, as if to say, "I WAS getting around to it!"

Any ideas for breaking a broody hen? We've heard that you should do what you can to get her out of the box and doing something else, and also to change the bedding and otherwise break up the routine of the nesting box. So that's what we've done so far.