Chicken Rescue

A few days ago while on the phone with my sister I glanced out the window and saw something white floating in the pond. It took me a second to realize what I was seeing. A chicken had fallen into our pond and was floating on the surface. At first glance, it looked dead, but then I saw the tiniest bit of movement from its head. I threw my phone down on the bed, yelling at my sister to hold on, then ran outside to grab this hen. She was absolutely soaked through, hypothermic, and barely alive. I knocked on my son’s window yelling “Bring me a towel quick!”. I wrapped her up and brought her inside and we started the process of trying to get her warmed back up and praying that she made it.

I have never had to save an animal like this before, but we at least knew we needed to dry her off and warm her up. The first thing we did was towel her off as best we could. Then we brought out the blow dryer and started drying her feathers and warming her body. I have heard you don’t want to heat them back up too quickly, and of course, we didn’t want to burn her with the hot air, so we ran the blow dryer on the low setting. The whole time we were drying her she just twitched. She didn’t fight us, she didn’t complain, she just twitched her legs almost like a shock response. When she finally started shivering again I was so happy. I felt like we were at least making progress and her body was fighting. Once her feathers were pretty dry we grabbed our brooder heat plate, wrapped her up, and let her lay on the heat. We also tucked a sock full of rice, which we microwaved for 1 minute, and a bottle of hot water under the blanket with her to give her immediate heat.

I don’t know how long she sat there and warmed up, maybe an hour or two, but she finally pulled through and started trying to stand up. Eventually, I was able to take her back out to her flock and she went about her day as if nothing had happened.

I am unsure exactly what happened since I didn’t see it, but I have a theory. We have a small fish pond in the back yard and the chickens like to perch on the side and drink out of it. They have their own water, but they seem to prefer to do this anyway. This particular day was very windy and I assume while she was drinking on the side she slipped or the wind pushed her in. Our weather has not heated up yet so when she couldn’t get out she sat there and got cold. Even her comb had started to turn colors almost like frostbite. I told the kids I think she was pretty close to not making it. I am so very thankful I happened to catch her in time and we were able to save her.

If your animal ever gets wet and cold, dry them off and then slowly warm them up. I have heard from many sources to not feed the animal anything or try to get them to drink until they are fully warmed back up. For us in this situation a hair dryer and then some sort of heat pad were what worked really well. A heat source like a heat pad, or a heat plate might be something worth investing into if you plan to keep livestock. We never know what emergency is awaiting us around the corner.