Impacted Crop/Sour Crop (Graphic Pics)

kuntrygirl · Jul 12, 2013

I have been seeing a few posts and reading a few problems about Impacted Crops and Sour Crops and wanted to compile this information so that if someone is searching for these terms or the term "swollen chest" and what to do, they can find it here.

If your bird's crop (chest) looks like this, they may have an impacted crop.

Internet Pic

The following is an excellent link to go to read about impacted crop so that you will know what to do.

http://www.browneggblueegg.com/Article/ImpactedCrop_OldWay.html

Impacted crops are not caused by your birds needing more grit. Grit is indeed necessary for birds that eat other than commercial feed; they need grit when they eat scratch grains, greens, and when they free range. Birds use grit in their gizzards to grind food; but the gizzard is far "downstream" from the crop. The crop is a kind of foyer into which all the food packs before moving into the digestive system.

Things that cause impacted crops are anything a bird eats that is too big to move into the digestive system. Some of these too big things are whole grain (especially for small birds), grapes, and greens. When free ranging birds eat greens they rip off small pieces and these pieces pass freely out of the crop. One way I caused impacted crops in our flock was letting the flock out on once long, freshly mown grass. They have no problem with long unmown grass because they can rip off little pieces. Long strands of fresh cut grass pile up in the gizzard and can't get out.

You need to flush and empty an impacted crop. You can use an eyedropper, a syringe without a needle, or a child’s ear syringe. Be sure to put the dropper or syringe all the way back in the bird’s mouth. There is a hole at the base of the tongue that leads to the bird’s lungs. You must be way past that or you will damage your bird.

First Treatment
You can start by putting an eyedropper full of vegetable oil into the crop and then massaging the crop. This will soften the impaction. Put the dropper all the way back in the bird's mouth and slowly push out the oil. Any vegetable oil is good: olive oil, corn oil, or canola oil.

Mix
1/2-cup baking soda
1 pint of warm water
Fill the syringe and insert it as far as you can into the mouth of the chicken. Have someone hold the bird upright in front of you. Slowly and very gently fill the crop, do not over fill and get liquid into that hole at the base of the tongue. Gently press up under the chicken’s breast and slide your hand up to the crop. This makes the bird open its mouth and the impacted mess will come out the bird's mouth. Push the contents up and out of the crop and out of the mouth. You can face the bird toward the ground to help empty the crop. Repeat this gentle stroking pressure until nothing comes up.

If there the crop is not empty, flush it again until it is empty.

Once the crop is empty, give another dropper of oil.

Coop the bird away from other birds so it can rest. Provide about a cup of water with 1 teaspoon terramycin dissolved in it. Give no feed.

Second Day
If the bird is droopy on the next day, put molasses in the bird’s water for about four hours (1/4 cup per gallon of water). Remove the molasses water after four hours and give the bird fresh terramycin water. The molasses water will flush soured food from the bird’s digestive system.

Follow Up Treatment
If the crop impacts again, repeat the flush.

Continue the terramycin for 7 days to avoid secondary infection.

After 24 hours, give only soft food for a week or so. This lets the inflamed and irritated crop recover and prevents another impaction.

The soft diet can include crumbles and chopped hard-boiled or microwaved eggs. You can feed bread if it is soaked in milk or buttermilk. Buttermilk is especially good because active culture buttermilk has good bacteria in it that help the bird’s digestion.

Be sure to also give the bird some beneficial bacteria. They keep digestion going correctly and fight disease by crowding out disease bacteria. You can just mix 1-2 teaspoons per bird of ACTIVE culture yogurt with a small amount of food and give this as the only food until they eat it. You can also buy lactobacillus at health food stores, pharmacies, Wal-Mart, and Lake's Unlimited 800-634-2473.

Give no grains, no large pellets, no not soaked bread, and no grass or greens because these can cause another impaction. Feed only things that almost fall apart when wet.

Glenda Heywood likes to feed this for the week

1 slice wheat bread
1/2-cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons active culture yogurt with no artificial sweetener
Babyfood (or unsweetened) apple sauce (as Barb recommends below).
Adding oil to the food will help avoid another impaction. Cod liver or wheat germ oil are good because they provide vitamins A, D, and E. Only add about 2% of the feed’s weight.

Barb Silcott's Preventative and Followup Treatment
"If you have a bird that continually comes up with an impacted crop, once you've emptied the crop and start making your soft feed for it, add some baby food type applesauce. (Unsweetened regular applesauce should be as good.) The applesauce helps get the crop emptied a little quicker and is also acidic which helps with the bacteria problem."

"This works for sour crop, too. In fact, when we're hand-feeding parrots, we always add some baby food applesauce to the formula to prevent sour crop. Works great! With all the parrots I've hand-fed over the years, I've never had a case of sour crop. I specify baby food applesauce because it doesn't have any added sugar which just aggravates the problems."

Sour Crop

Sour crop is a condition caused by the crop not fully emptying. An accumulation of food begins to ferment and is either caused by or results in a plug of material blocking passage further into the digestive system. A fungal infection rapidly takes hold, making the problem even worse.

The crop is the pouch of skin below a chicken’s wattles (dangly bits under the beak). It is where food goes when swallowed before heading further into the digestive system. The crop varies in size depending upon how much food a chicken has consumed, sometimes appearing to be a quite heavy and round ball and on other occasions being more like an empty bag.

When something goes wrong with the workings of the crop, a chicken finds itself in trouble very quickly.

How to Recognize Sour Crop

It is easy to identify sour crop. The symptoms are as follows:
crop fails to empty.
chicken has awful bad breath.
crop seems filled with water and has a balloon-like feel.
an affected bird may jerk its head around, trying to dislodge a blockage.
the crop is abnormally large and does not fluctuate in size.
A chicken that has suffered from sour crop for a while will also display the following symptoms:
significant weight loss.
disengagement from social activity with the rest of the flock.
little if any interest in eating or drinking.
droopy tail.
unusually depressed responses to external stimuli

How to Make Sour Crop go Away
Isolate the chicken. Separating the bird with sour crop from its flock provides it with the space needed for a quiet and stress-free recovery.
Don’t feed solid food. No layers’ pellets, no corn, no greens. These will only further exacerbate the problem.
Try soft food. Cold mashed potatoes (no butter or salt) and plain boiled rice are good choices. Such foods stand a chance of getting past any blockage, and won’t worsen the problem.
Clean water must always be accessible but do not add anything to it. Cider vinegar, a favourite additive said to help fight worms and other parasites, can make sour crop worse.
Give the bird a small amount of plain bio-yoghurt containing ‘friendly bacteria’ on a daily basis. The evidence for the efficacy of these bacteria in helping chickens is anecdotal but the yoghurt certainly does no harm to chickens and may help, so it is worth giving it a try. And they like it.

Try to loosen impacted material inside the crop. Using an eyedropper or syringe, open the chicken’s beak and get vegetable oil into the crop in very small quantities of no more than 5ml, once a day. Be careful to get the applicator right inside, beyond the tiny hole at the back of the bird’s tongue that leads directly to the lungs. Otherwise the bird could choke.
Follow the oil with gentle massage of the crop in a downward direction, towards the belly, just for a few minutes. The crop can be massaged again later but no more than once every hour or two to avoid upsetting the bird, which would impact on its recovery chances.

The Last Resort Against Sour Crop
Vomiting can be induced preferably by a vet and with two people involved. It must be borne in mind that the shock and upset of this procedure can easily kill an already compromised chicken.

The procedure is as follows:
Wrap the bird in a towel and gently tilt it forward (not back) so that its body is vertical to the floor and head close to the ground.
Massage the crop down towards the beak.
The beak may have to be opened to get the vomit out.
Do this for no more than half a minute, maximum.
Allow the bird to rest and attempt the procedure only once or twice.
When the crop is partly or completely emptied, allow the bird to rest and keep it separate from the flock until a full recovery is confirmed.
If this does not work, a vet can (dependent upon how ill the chicken is) perform surgery to open the crop and manually remove the blocking materials.

Digestive System

Pics of birds (from the internet) that have impacted crop. This is what an impacted crop will looks like. If you notice that your bird's chest is larger than normal and/or feathers are missing, then your birds most likely has impacted crop. You will need to act immediately to resolve this problem.