Holy Crop! My chicken has a tumor.

I’m new to chicken keeping, like embarrassingly new. My grandmother, my aunt, and I collectively decided that buying 30 baby chicks all at once was a great idea…and that for whatever reason my house seemed the best place for them despite my lack of experience. So after they were old enough to get out of their brooders we excitedly moved them into their newly constructed coop. All seemed to be going well the first day and then all of a sudden on the second morning I went out to check on the chicks, check food and water, and open coop windows for ventilation and lo and behold I find a chick with a giant tumor on her neck!

I’m freaking out…What the heck is it? Where did it come from? Do you take chickens to vets?

So I do what anyone would do, start texting people. I text my grandma and my aunt, “One of our chicks has a tumor.” My aunt doesn’t care to grace me with a response and after a few minutes of being ignored my grandma suddenly appears in the coop.

“Oh thank goodness!” I think.

And then she starts in…”Huh. I have never seen that before, do you take chickens to the vet?”

So I quickly realize she’s not the person to save the day this time. So I of course do the next thing any normal person in 2020 would do. Google.

And to my surprise a TON of information pops up about chicken crops. This does not mean plants that chickens like to eat, this is an organ inside of a chicken that stores their food until it can be digested properly. Who knew? Not me! In all my life and in all my pinterest research about everything I needed to know about having chickens I saw NOTHING about a chicken crop.

So to save all you rookie chicken keepers the panic I had to suffer I’m going to share a few things I wish I had known before I got chickens.

This is the anatomy of a chicken…

That little white pouch between the oesophagus and the gizzard is the crop. It stores food until it can be properly digested by the gizzard, which I already mentioned but the other thing you need to know is that in order for the gizzard to work properly it needs grit. Grit is pretty much just dirt and sand that chickens will pick up while scratching and pecking for food but it is vital for their digestion. Without grit the gizzard can’t grind up the food for proper absorption of nutrients and digestion.

Because my chicks weren’t allowed outside the coop for a couple days because their run wasn’t finished and because I had no dish of grit inside the coop my poor little chick got a little backed up, hence the tumor. Which really just turned out to be an impacted crop. After finding this out, the chicks were let out to get their daily dosage of grit, the crop went down on its own after a day or so, and she was back to hanging with her gang of sex links like nothing ever happened.

Although there are times that other measures are needed I have been lucky not to have had one so serious so far on my chicken keeping adventure. If ever a time comes that I have to empty a chickens crop, or take them to the vet for surgical removal though, fear not! I will be sure to let you all know all about it!