How To / Not To With Fly Paper

I'm cringing as I write this. My poor, poor chickens. This is my first How To/ Not To installment. Unfortunately, I think this will be a regular part of my blog.

It's no secret that City Dog (a.k.a Your Next Kill Will Be Your Last) enjoys the hunt. A lesser known fact is that he's a wasteful hunter. He does nothing with his kill. His last kill was yesterday. He took down two turkeys and one hen. It was bad. The chickens were terrorized. They don't need the stress and there was a lot of it.

More stress today. On the heels of this massacre, I notice the flies were getting really bad in the chicken coop. It has been hotter than August and bugs just love the ripe smell our chickens produce.

So I bought fly paper.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

I hung it in the chicken coop way up high, out of the reach of the chickens. How exciting it was to think that soon our coop would be fly-free. Reducing the fly population would be a great thing. Why didn't more people do this, I wondered. It's so easy.

A-hem. Right.

At chicken bedtime, DH called out to me that a chicken was stuck.... in the fly paper. Oh for the love...!!! He didn't want to pull the paper off because he was afraid to hurt the chicken. I took the chicken, that was kicking frantically and had one wing stuck to its body, and explained that hurting was inevitable. What we wanted to avoid was breaking the wing. The chicken could take a few missing feathers. It would have to.

Carefully, holding the chicken under my left arm, I pulled two pieces of fly paper and countless feathers off the poor chicken. It look some doing. Gently pull the paper off in the direction the feathers grow. If you pull in the opposite direction of the feathers, you risk breaking feathers and I can't imagine that is good for the chicken.

Fly paper is disgustingly sticky and gooey. It sticks and sticks and sticks. I recommend having someone close by who can remove the fly paper from your own hand if there is more than one piece stuck to an animal.

Lesson learned.

Incidentally, the chicken is recovering well and doesn't seem at all phased by her bald spots.