Hi I'm a first time chick owner, I got 9 silkie (probably mixed) chicks 3 weeks ago, two of them were 2 weeks old and 7 of them 1 week old. I'm in a small city in Mexico now, and the local resources are quite limited. I've been feeding them the only commercial chick starter (I believe it's non-medicated) I could find here and using packaged aspen bedding from Petco. They have been together for 3 weeks and never seemed to have health issues. I noticed they are picking and eating a lot of the bedding though, but none of them seem to have digestive problems except one had dirty vent which I kept cleaning. That same chick was found sneezing and making gurgling sounds yesterday so I isolated the chick and cleaned out the brooder. The other chicks seem normal except occasional sneezing. The isolated chick got stressed being alone and I could see clearly that he or she was wheezing while breathing and shaking the head a lot and sneezing a lot. He had some diarrhea yesterday but I bought a new batch of commercial feed today and the poop is normal. I've been using only paper towels for him and keeping it very clean. I freaked out that he might have some sort of bad contagious respiratory illness so I went to the feed store and bought all the medicine they had in the store for chickens. I'm not sure what they are, but I think they are different types of antibiotics and I chose to just have them but not to use any, because the chick looks better today. He is not wheezing while breathing, but now only sneezing. Never had mucus or discharge. The vent looks fluffy and dry now. Once or twice I saw his head getting tilted slowly and he shook it off and got normal again. That weird head motion freaked me out. I'm not sure what he has. Can digestive problems create such symptoms? Or wheezing is strictly respiratory illness? If the chick keeps getting better without medicine, and returns back to normal how long do I wait until I can return him to the rest of the chicks?
Another thing, one of the other chicks looks like it's missing a piece of comb and it's dry, it looks like a small dry crater in the middle of the head. I checked photos for fungal infections but this one doesn't look like them. Could it just be that someone pecked his head? I'm totally new to this and any little anomaly is making me worry. Thank you.
Another thing, one of the other chicks looks like it's missing a piece of comb and it's dry, it looks like a small dry crater in the middle of the head. I checked photos for fungal infections but this one doesn't look like them. Could it just be that someone pecked his head? I'm totally new to this and any little anomaly is making me worry. Thank you.
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I am hoping for the best!
