Splodge
...our special needs chicken
This little chicken probably wouldn’t be here now if the vet had her way.
This is Splodge.
Originally, this cute but often quite vocal Silkie hen was one of a pair we took on in May 2024, who we named Beaker and Bunsen because of their funny little fluffy heads and the odd squeaky chirping noises they make. These ladies are small, and cute, but they are very noisy when they are displeased.
Beaker and Bunsen ran around the garden together for a year or so, sleeping in the same spot, often wanting to lay eggs in the same place and shouting at each other a lot. I’ve found them literally sitting on top of each other before, neither chicken willing to give up her spot. There are multiple places these girls can lay eggs, but there’s usually one that they are all fighting over. In spring/summer this results in squabbles and a lot of shouting.
Broody hens
All was well with Beaker and Bunsen until last summer.
They both decided they wanted to be mother hens at the same time, taking up residence in the smallest coop nesting boxes and refusing to budge.
It’s one of those annoying things that happens with hens, they’ll take themselves off into a safe space and sit on eggs, often stealing them from each other, in an attempt to hatch them.
Our oldest girl, Ginger. who we lost recently, was a pain for doing this, and would growl menacingly at anyone who had the audacity to try and remove one of her stolen eggs from under her. I’ve been pecked on multiple occasions by territorial chickens. You wouldn’t mess with this face, would you? (Or the beak.)
So, we weren’t overly worried when Beaker and Bunsen decided to play Mum last summer. But they were particularly stubborn, so we’d have to pick them up out of their spots every day and plonk them down near water and food, to make sure they ate. They pecked and squawked at us but they’d usually toddle off, have some food and then toddle back for more babysitting.
Eventually broody hens get bored, except Ginger, who used to eventually have to be physically locked out of the place where she’d decided to hatch her imaginary chicks -for her own good.
Beaker and Bunsen did eventually get over it and get back to toddling around the garden again. But we noticed Beaker was acting strangely.
“That chicken is being weird”
Anyone who’s ever had a Silkie hen knows that they are adorable but not the cleverest in the flock, so at first, when she started acting weird, we weren’t too concerned. But we soon realised something wasn’t right.
She was hanging her head down, and struggling to walk. She started falling over, and sitting down and twisting her neck up in a really odd way as if she was having trouble holding her head up straight. Silkies have long necks which are delicate and prone to injury, but we hadn’t seen her hurt herself.
We did what we always do with poorly girls, we brought her indoors and kept her warm, safe and fed, but she seemed to go downhill to the point where she was hardly moving at all.
We took her to the vet, who gave her a painkiller shot and said that she could put her to sleep if we wanted. We didn’t. We’d already seen similar cases online where chickens had got a condition called ‘wry neck’ which is often caused by a vitamin deficiency (and having been broody, it was likely little Beaker hadn’t been eating enough, or properly.)
Vets always seem to want to euthanise pet chickens. But the British Hen Welfare website said that it was very likely she would recover, it just might take a bit of time. Luckily, both Mister and I work at home so we were able to take care of her indoors for a couple of months. Yes, months. Reader, we had to steam clean the carpet once we moved her, because that girl did not respect the boundaries of the towels we put down for her to sit on.
The Splodgification
At first, we had to care for her pretty much all day long, and she’d sleep in a cage at night to keep her safe. She lost the ability to feed herself from normal feeders, or to drink, so Mister would make her vitamin-fortified scrambled egg in a shallow dish every day, along with proper chicken mash, and would sit her on his lap and drip water into her beak with a pipette every few hours to make sure she could drink.
Sometimes, Beaker did not want to drink, and would shake water all over us (I took over sometimes) - that’s how we knew the little dot had some fight left in her! I can’t remember when we started calling her Splodge, but it stuck.
Slowly she started to move around, although her party trick was to shuffle backwards under the chair in the living room, where she would do an enormous dump and have to be rescued before the resulting clean up operation.
Rehab for chickens
Once she was mobile, she was moved into the office/shed in the garden, where she slept overnight and was let out again as soon as she was well enough during the day.
We considered renaming Splodge again to “Gizmo” at one point - yes, she was cute, but we couldn’t leave her out after dark, or let her get wet! (If you know, you know.)
By the start of 2026, she was getting stronger all the time, eating and drinking independently and getting good and chunky, so she was well and truly on the mend. She’d sleep under the desk in the shed, with the radio on overnight, and if it was too cold, she’d be in there during the day, too.
The other girls caught on to the fact she had her own supply of food in there and would chase us up the garden to get first dibs on the food that got shaken out of the towels we put down. This is despite the fact they had feeders full of the exact same stuff in the garden. Chickens don’t like to think they are missing out!
Splodge now
This was taken at the end of January - and Splodge is pretty much back with her mates all the time now. She’s not quite 100% even after about six months; she’s still a bit twitchy, and occasionally ‘stargazes’. She can’t run quite as fast as the rest of them, and she can’t manage to get up the steps to the back door and beg for treats like the other girls do. But she’s made a pretty good recovery from the helpless little fluff ball she was at the end of last summer, and she sleeps back with her sister again.
She’s our special needs chicken.
She’s about two years old now, and with any luck, there’s no reason why she won’t live as long as her sister, who has also been renamed to the stunningly inventive, “Fluff.”
Just goes to show, with a little TLC, you can nurse a chicken back to a proper life even after the vet’s given up on her.