I'll add to the above title, an almost confirmed partly blocked and/or pendulous crop. The list just keeps getting longer.
My 2018 year with chickens has started with a bang - the bad kind, and it has been boiling since at least mid-december 2017. The rookie that I am in poultry unfortunately did not recognize all the signs for what they were, and despite my growing worries, the sheer difficulty at finding an available and affordable vet for a consultation on chickens only happened three months later.
What my chickens have:
Ameraucana rooster (Easter Egger): Newest arrival; scratches himself silly all the way to breaking and plucking his feathers, makes flute sounds whenever he sneezes, has a dry-wheezy respiration, sometimes coughs, shakes his head, gasps for breath, got a slightly purple-ish comb, very nervous and flighty, easily stressed out. Feather and poop samples were taken for testing. Lice has been spotted all over his body (both adults and eggs), and the vet strongly suspects worms to inhabit his lungs, cue the respiratory difficulties.
Blue Ameraucana hen: Newest arrival; my rooster's flockmate, she's full of lice too. She also lays twin-colored, part smooth & part rugged/pebbled, sometimes soft-shelled (dented?) eggs. Very nervous and flighty, does not like being handled at all.
White Chantecler x brown hen hybrid: This hen is, by far, the worst off of all my chickens; she's vigorous and curious, yet has persistant chronic diarrhea that stinks to high heavens and back. The watery poop changes from green to brownish to normal-looking fece consistence soaked in water, sometimes all three at the same time. Last week I spotted a tiny bit of blood in her poop, so tripled my searches for a vet to find a cure against coccidiosis asap. My brown hen also has a definite problem at the crop; it's big like a tennis ball at dusk, sometimes doughy sometimes squishy, often swings like a pendulum, not always empty at dawn. She's fine with it most of the time, though I've seen her bob her neck once or twice, trying to stack her food down her crop, and when she roosts the crop definitely hangs out. Yet when I touch and massage it, it is not tender or sore to the touch. Lastly, the poor gal has visible weight loss, though she's still an energitic and voracious lady. She's eight months old, going on nine, has laid close to 25 eggs in three months's time, and has a poopy butt. Poop tests have revealed she's carrying coccidiose, ascaridiose, capillariose and heterakidose. No crop worms were spotted, so it's possible she has a pendulous crop on top of everything else, caused by a partial blockage of her crop.
Mottled white hen (white chantecler x plymouth rock hybrid): Very nervous and flighty, looks fine on all accounts but has been spotted more than once having browinish diarrhea in the last two weeks.
Light columbian bantam bendy hen: she's fine so far, nothing to signal, though with my rooster's bad case of Iice I wouldn't be surprised if she got invaded along with the rest of my hens. Poop samples were sent to see if she had anything wrong inward; no results yet.
I got my brown, mottled and bantam bendy white hens together mid-december, all at five months old; they were strong and healthy, all doing well, except for the chronic diarrhea I've described above in my brown hen since day 1 in the coop.
I got my Ameraucana pair from another place about three weeks ago; they looked strong and healthy when I saw them the first time around, though the rooster did have the flute sneeze problem once we were driving back home. Past internet searches on his odd symptoms turned up nothing of value, so I let it be as I hadn't yet found a vet or BYC to help me figure out what was wrong with my bird. People around me, when questionned, said coop dust was most likely the culprit of his sneezes.
I only have one chicken coop, which is inside a shed and was built by someone else before me. I've divided the coop into two sections to better fit my beginner needs: the big coop and the small coop. The big coop is the main one my flock lives in, usually unheated, and is currently inhabited by my december trio of mottled-brown-white hens. The small coop is something I designed last year to be a small, foldable, paneled section screwed inside the big coop that I could unfold and make into a small, heated coop during wintertime. It's around ¼ the size of the big coop, and has the multi-purpose feature of serving as a heated coop, quarantine corner, nursery, breeding pen and brooding pen, however the need applies. Right now it serves as a quarantine corner for my Ameraucana pair. However due to past escapes by both birds as I tried to catch them for further examination, the lice they have on themselves has been sprayed all over the big coop, so it's very possible both big and small coops are now crawling with lice. Coccidiosis treament via the water bottles of all my birds has forced me to keep the big coop heated to stop the water from freezing, so this plus the fact the shed's last owner didn't close all the gaps in the coop's walls means the lice have more than ideal conditions to breed. (I can close most wall gaps but not those around the electricity plugs, who are buried into the walls so deep you see the mineral wool sticking out from the sides of the holes.)
Upon vet consultation, she vaccinated all five of my chickens against lung worms, stated my flock on Amphrol for coccidiosis, and recommended I make a dry cleansing of the coop each week for at least a month to both prevent further coccidiosis problems by taking away humidity sources, and keep the lice from over-infesting my hens in the process. She also told me to use Dusting Powder (found in BMR coop, Île d'Orléans, Qc) on the litter, every nook and cranny of the coop plus my birds themselves, as well as thoroughly clean all items and objects at each litter change.
Despite my best efforts the lice are still there two weeks later, and seem to multiply more than die at the powder's hands despite copious amounts laid everywhere take care of the problem. My equally dusted rooster is still just as infested with lice, and his respiratory problems have not shown any signs of getting better. He's actually sneezing more often, and his voice is now one notch higher than before. My blue hen is alright, but still continues to lay odd-looking eggs despite my giving her egg shells to raise her calcium levels.
(I've not yet found oyster shells for sale, due to the sheer bad luck I've had with my chickens in general, as well as the difficulty of finding basic chicken products like poultry grit close to home and not on the other side of the country. Finding an afforable vet that actually treated chickens has also taken much of my time, the rest being spent searching for the possible causes behind what's ailing my hens on the internet, since local farmers are no big help on the matter as they prefer to cull their own problem hens rather than look deeper and fix them.)
My mottled hen still has occasional diarrhea. My white bendy hen, bless her little soul, is thriving amidst all the mayhem of her flockmates. My brown hen has not shown the dreaded bloody poop again, but still has faint-worthy smell diarrhea, an unresolved problem crop, and I also suspect she's slowly losing weight due to ascaridiose eating up most of the food that manages to go into her stomach. This parasite worries me the most along with the lung/gape worms, as the vaccine does not seem to be working on my rooster and my hen can't be treated for ascaridiose due to being on priority treatment for coccidiose. Lice is also a problem I just can't let go of, as it seems to stress my animals further, and lower their immune systems as a result. I also would like to know, whether chicken lice transmits to humans or not. I've been showering like crazy just in case, but the water bills are climbing up.
Seeing the hellish mess I am engulfed in with my chickens, and fearing for the lives of my brown hen plus my rooster, I'm turning to BYC for help concerning alternative emergency treaments for ALL of the external and internal parasites above; I desperately need a simple, preferably cheap, proven effective and especially available way to treat my hen's four parasites at the same time (or at least three, since I'm getting that heterakidose is common and usually does not cause problems in chickens), as well as cover my rooster's lung worms lest I lose him to asphyxation somewhere in the future. Hitting a single parasite at once means the others aren't getting flushed out and keep weakening my chickens, and while I might have gone with coccidiosis first-ascaridosis second in my brown hen's case, knowing she's been slowly losing weight for the past three months means she could top over at any moment in I-don't-know-how-much-left time. My main obstacle to fully care for my chickens is money; I've got a tiny wallet, and quickly went dry consulting the vet (who's located 1 hour away from home), getting the Dusting Powder, changing the litter/food three times, my costly back-and-forth 30 mins treks between the coop and the house to get other poultry supplies, and having mistakenly bought/opened/used grain-mixed grit where I thought it was pure grit. Financial walls prevent me from ordering what I need by mail or internet, unfortunately.
If anyone knows of a way to hit all the above-mentioned parasites at once without endangering the chickens (preferably naturally, since they're already under meds, but I'll take any suggestions nonetheless), please speak up below. I am doing my best currently, but it is extremely draining and obviously not enough; with so many emergencies to tend to at once and no former experience in dealing with any problem parasites before, I'm not sure where to go from there, much less how to keep going. What would you guys do if you were in my shoes??
My 2018 year with chickens has started with a bang - the bad kind, and it has been boiling since at least mid-december 2017. The rookie that I am in poultry unfortunately did not recognize all the signs for what they were, and despite my growing worries, the sheer difficulty at finding an available and affordable vet for a consultation on chickens only happened three months later.
What my chickens have:
Ameraucana rooster (Easter Egger): Newest arrival; scratches himself silly all the way to breaking and plucking his feathers, makes flute sounds whenever he sneezes, has a dry-wheezy respiration, sometimes coughs, shakes his head, gasps for breath, got a slightly purple-ish comb, very nervous and flighty, easily stressed out. Feather and poop samples were taken for testing. Lice has been spotted all over his body (both adults and eggs), and the vet strongly suspects worms to inhabit his lungs, cue the respiratory difficulties.
Blue Ameraucana hen: Newest arrival; my rooster's flockmate, she's full of lice too. She also lays twin-colored, part smooth & part rugged/pebbled, sometimes soft-shelled (dented?) eggs. Very nervous and flighty, does not like being handled at all.
White Chantecler x brown hen hybrid: This hen is, by far, the worst off of all my chickens; she's vigorous and curious, yet has persistant chronic diarrhea that stinks to high heavens and back. The watery poop changes from green to brownish to normal-looking fece consistence soaked in water, sometimes all three at the same time. Last week I spotted a tiny bit of blood in her poop, so tripled my searches for a vet to find a cure against coccidiosis asap. My brown hen also has a definite problem at the crop; it's big like a tennis ball at dusk, sometimes doughy sometimes squishy, often swings like a pendulum, not always empty at dawn. She's fine with it most of the time, though I've seen her bob her neck once or twice, trying to stack her food down her crop, and when she roosts the crop definitely hangs out. Yet when I touch and massage it, it is not tender or sore to the touch. Lastly, the poor gal has visible weight loss, though she's still an energitic and voracious lady. She's eight months old, going on nine, has laid close to 25 eggs in three months's time, and has a poopy butt. Poop tests have revealed she's carrying coccidiose, ascaridiose, capillariose and heterakidose. No crop worms were spotted, so it's possible she has a pendulous crop on top of everything else, caused by a partial blockage of her crop.
Mottled white hen (white chantecler x plymouth rock hybrid): Very nervous and flighty, looks fine on all accounts but has been spotted more than once having browinish diarrhea in the last two weeks.
Light columbian bantam bendy hen: she's fine so far, nothing to signal, though with my rooster's bad case of Iice I wouldn't be surprised if she got invaded along with the rest of my hens. Poop samples were sent to see if she had anything wrong inward; no results yet.
I got my brown, mottled and bantam bendy white hens together mid-december, all at five months old; they were strong and healthy, all doing well, except for the chronic diarrhea I've described above in my brown hen since day 1 in the coop.
I got my Ameraucana pair from another place about three weeks ago; they looked strong and healthy when I saw them the first time around, though the rooster did have the flute sneeze problem once we were driving back home. Past internet searches on his odd symptoms turned up nothing of value, so I let it be as I hadn't yet found a vet or BYC to help me figure out what was wrong with my bird. People around me, when questionned, said coop dust was most likely the culprit of his sneezes.
I only have one chicken coop, which is inside a shed and was built by someone else before me. I've divided the coop into two sections to better fit my beginner needs: the big coop and the small coop. The big coop is the main one my flock lives in, usually unheated, and is currently inhabited by my december trio of mottled-brown-white hens. The small coop is something I designed last year to be a small, foldable, paneled section screwed inside the big coop that I could unfold and make into a small, heated coop during wintertime. It's around ¼ the size of the big coop, and has the multi-purpose feature of serving as a heated coop, quarantine corner, nursery, breeding pen and brooding pen, however the need applies. Right now it serves as a quarantine corner for my Ameraucana pair. However due to past escapes by both birds as I tried to catch them for further examination, the lice they have on themselves has been sprayed all over the big coop, so it's very possible both big and small coops are now crawling with lice. Coccidiosis treament via the water bottles of all my birds has forced me to keep the big coop heated to stop the water from freezing, so this plus the fact the shed's last owner didn't close all the gaps in the coop's walls means the lice have more than ideal conditions to breed. (I can close most wall gaps but not those around the electricity plugs, who are buried into the walls so deep you see the mineral wool sticking out from the sides of the holes.)
Upon vet consultation, she vaccinated all five of my chickens against lung worms, stated my flock on Amphrol for coccidiosis, and recommended I make a dry cleansing of the coop each week for at least a month to both prevent further coccidiosis problems by taking away humidity sources, and keep the lice from over-infesting my hens in the process. She also told me to use Dusting Powder (found in BMR coop, Île d'Orléans, Qc) on the litter, every nook and cranny of the coop plus my birds themselves, as well as thoroughly clean all items and objects at each litter change.
Despite my best efforts the lice are still there two weeks later, and seem to multiply more than die at the powder's hands despite copious amounts laid everywhere take care of the problem. My equally dusted rooster is still just as infested with lice, and his respiratory problems have not shown any signs of getting better. He's actually sneezing more often, and his voice is now one notch higher than before. My blue hen is alright, but still continues to lay odd-looking eggs despite my giving her egg shells to raise her calcium levels.
(I've not yet found oyster shells for sale, due to the sheer bad luck I've had with my chickens in general, as well as the difficulty of finding basic chicken products like poultry grit close to home and not on the other side of the country. Finding an afforable vet that actually treated chickens has also taken much of my time, the rest being spent searching for the possible causes behind what's ailing my hens on the internet, since local farmers are no big help on the matter as they prefer to cull their own problem hens rather than look deeper and fix them.)
My mottled hen still has occasional diarrhea. My white bendy hen, bless her little soul, is thriving amidst all the mayhem of her flockmates. My brown hen has not shown the dreaded bloody poop again, but still has faint-worthy smell diarrhea, an unresolved problem crop, and I also suspect she's slowly losing weight due to ascaridiose eating up most of the food that manages to go into her stomach. This parasite worries me the most along with the lung/gape worms, as the vaccine does not seem to be working on my rooster and my hen can't be treated for ascaridiose due to being on priority treatment for coccidiose. Lice is also a problem I just can't let go of, as it seems to stress my animals further, and lower their immune systems as a result. I also would like to know, whether chicken lice transmits to humans or not. I've been showering like crazy just in case, but the water bills are climbing up.
Seeing the hellish mess I am engulfed in with my chickens, and fearing for the lives of my brown hen plus my rooster, I'm turning to BYC for help concerning alternative emergency treaments for ALL of the external and internal parasites above; I desperately need a simple, preferably cheap, proven effective and especially available way to treat my hen's four parasites at the same time (or at least three, since I'm getting that heterakidose is common and usually does not cause problems in chickens), as well as cover my rooster's lung worms lest I lose him to asphyxation somewhere in the future. Hitting a single parasite at once means the others aren't getting flushed out and keep weakening my chickens, and while I might have gone with coccidiosis first-ascaridosis second in my brown hen's case, knowing she's been slowly losing weight for the past three months means she could top over at any moment in I-don't-know-how-much-left time. My main obstacle to fully care for my chickens is money; I've got a tiny wallet, and quickly went dry consulting the vet (who's located 1 hour away from home), getting the Dusting Powder, changing the litter/food three times, my costly back-and-forth 30 mins treks between the coop and the house to get other poultry supplies, and having mistakenly bought/opened/used grain-mixed grit where I thought it was pure grit. Financial walls prevent me from ordering what I need by mail or internet, unfortunately.
If anyone knows of a way to hit all the above-mentioned parasites at once without endangering the chickens (preferably naturally, since they're already under meds, but I'll take any suggestions nonetheless), please speak up below. I am doing my best currently, but it is extremely draining and obviously not enough; with so many emergencies to tend to at once and no former experience in dealing with any problem parasites before, I'm not sure where to go from there, much less how to keep going. What would you guys do if you were in my shoes??
