Has anyone had leg problems with their birds. I'm inclined to believe that the problems we (Neal and I) have been having are incubation problems rather than genetic because we have experienced several birds now (from a couple of different breeds but mostly delawares ) Its a little hard to diagnose at this point because it seems to crop up at different ages. In general at some point the leg becomes dislocated at the hip apparently and will turn backwards. I think this weakness in the legs is responsible for some bad hatches as well as several chicks not able to stand within a day or two. Some of the later onset ones appear to have splayed leg but traditional treatments dont seem to work. A couple of older birds (under 12 weeks) have also developed leg problems. The older birds with the problems are not delawares. That's why I think it might be incubation related because the birds are unrelated but show similar symptoms. The hybrid (RIRxLeghorn) birds however seem to do this later in development. We have been seeing poor hatch rates from the Delaware eggs but some tinkering with the incubators have resulted in a bit better rate of the delawares hatching in this last round. However one of them appears to be having this same leg problem at about 3 weeks of age. Any thoughts would be helpful.
