She must have eaten a bee!

August 17, 2015

It was a weird weekend…!

Duck Billed Turkey?

It started with me finding this turkey hen. She’s one of the 3 moms with the newest babies (unlike chickens, turkeys mother in groups). I caught a glance then looked again, and couldn’t believe what I saw. It was a duck-billed dinosaur!

At first, I thought maybe she’d swallowed something too large for her and it was caught in her throat.  I caught after a good amount of darting and dodging (one of the reasons I’m in such good shape is that I do a lot of those mini sprints these days, chasing down birds) and felt her throat.  The swelling squished.  Definitely not a “thing”.  The skin on her head was simply swollen.  Apparently, whatever bit her wasn’t too poisonous as she acts normal enough.  But I feel so sorry for her!  Three days later the swelling is finally going down, thank heavens!

SNAKE!

Then came Sunday.  Cleaning day!  All the food dishes, waterers and other implements get cleaned and the coops get scraped out.  Well, I started scraping the back turkey coop only to uncover this:

A King snake had tried to come up through the hardware cloth on the bottom of the cook and gotten stuck halfway. I admit it…I screamed when I uncovered her.  Not out of fear, though.  I was just surprised.

Well, I couldn’t leave her there.  She eats mice and rats and other things that eat my chicken food.  So off I went to fetch the wire snips and a pair of gloves.  The gloves were absolutely necessary.  I knew she’d bite me while I worked.  She might not be poisonous, but snake bites hurt.  I got bit by a boa constrictor once…but that’s another story.  It took a few minutes but I got her cut free, then put her outside the coop where the turkeys couldn’t see her.  They happily eat snakes and she wasn’t that big. Off she went, hopefully breathing a sigh of relief.