Impaction from hulled sunflower seeds

[DonyaQuick]

As the title says, I have a hen that somehow ended up with a serious gut impaction consisting of hulled sunflower seeds / sunflower hearts. The reason I'm not posting in the emergincies forum is that she's actually doing great right now - the crisis time is over, treatment is well along, she's eating/drinking and generally on the mend. However, when she was in the worst of it, she was pooping out literally just balls of partially digested sunflower hearts - along with grit! So she obviously had been eating grit to help break things down and it just got bound up in the seeds. Clumps of seeds have been continuing to periodically come out this poor girl for 5 days now, although it's finally transitioning to mostly normal poop with just a seed or two in it. So now I'm trying to figure out how/why this happened.

I have seen birds binge on sunflower hearts before without issue, so I'm having a really hard time figuring out why it ended up as an impaction this time. There has been no traditional impaction material in with the seed clumps like hair, grass, etc...just piles of seeds stuck together with small amounts of other digested matter. The seeds themselves are rather sticky in a partially-digested state, so I assume that must be what's contributing to them binding together, but still...so many birds will binge on those without this happening. I also have no idea when she would have had an opportunity to consume that many seeds without competition from the rest of the flock; I do sometimes throw a handful into the run, but with 12 birds going at it nobody has a chance to eat the whole lot. So there are many points of weirdness in this to me.

Has anyone else has seen something like this happen with hulled seeds? Is there something about sunflower hearts in particular that makes them risky if a bird somehow manages to eat a ton of them unsupervised? Is there any similar risk for other whole grains binding together like this?

 

[townchicks]

I'm glad your hen is improving. I don't have any insight on why, just a guess on how. I know crows and jays will hoard nuts and seeds in nooks and crannies of rocks and hollow logs. Is it possible that she stumbled across one of these hoards?

 

[DonyaQuick]

I'm glad your hen is improving. I don't have any insight on why, just a guess on how. I know crows and jays will hoard nuts and seeds in nooks and crannies of rocks and hollow logs. Is it possible that she stumbled across one of these hoards?

That flock doesn't free range anymore, so probably not a bird cache they got into, but...you've reminded me that there was either a mouse or a vole getting into the run a while back through a riddiculously deep and long burrow going under the HWC. I solved that by letting the auto door open much earlier one day. The hens have really been digging at one area since then...could very possibly have been a rodent cache. If it was, those sunflower hearts might not even have been the ones I've been feeding. In the past, I've found other caches around/in my home composed of seeds and nuts and things where I had no idea where they came from (like a recently discovered cache of pistachios with shells behind my dishasher...nobody in the house eats those).

 

[rosemarythyme]

She must've really gorged hard on them to end up impacting herself like that. I was going to suggest switching to sunflower seed in shell instead, but since these weren't put out for her deliberately then that's a bit trickier.

I do have crows that bring in peanut shells and drop them all over the place but the chickens don't want them so it's not really an issue.

 

[DonyaQuick]

She must've really gorged hard on them to end up impacting herself like that. I was going to suggest switching to sunflower seed in shell instead, but since these weren't put out for her deliberately then that's a bit trickier.

I do have crows that bring in peanut shells and drop them all over the place but the chickens don't want them so it's not really an issue.

Would shelled ones not be more of a risk for impaction if eaten in large quantities by accident? I thought if a lot of shells got broken up it would kind of be like eating shavings or something.

With the quantity of sunflower seeds that came out of that hen, I really do now think it has to have been some kind of cache she uncovered at the edge of the run. She was still pooping a few seeds here and there even this morning! The only other obvious candidate source would be the bird feeder on the other side of my house; didn't think about that until just now since I've mostly been feeding suet in it for the winter months. When it's warmer I sometimes use a shell-less hot pepper seed mix in that bird feeder. I've just seen the most recent bag I opened has a lot of hulled sunflower seeds, maybe 50%. Although not that frequent, I definitely do put more of it out in a lump amount. So maybe that's more plausible as the source? It really is a long way for a rodent to cart stuff though and my chickens never, ever get over to that side of the property even when they escape...so still weird. Unfortunately if I don't have something in the wild bird feeder periodically I get a lot more birds trying to get into the chicken enclosures but maybe I'll go back to suet...

 

[rosemarythyme]

Would shelled ones not be more of a risk for impaction if eaten in large quantities by accident? I thought if a lot of shells got broken up it would kind of be like eating shavings or something.

I would think the shells would slow her down, since they'd need to be broken down.

Maybe try putting out less bird seed for the wild birds, and see if that helps? It does sound like a rodent or squirrel possibly stashed them somewhere, but without seeing it happen, you won't know for sure.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Maybe try putting out less bird seed for the wild birds, and see if that helps? It does sound like a rodent or squirrel possibly stashed them somewhere, but without seeing it happen, you won't know for sure.

The big gray squirrels ensured that I had to make some kind of bird feeder switch this past weekend...I let it run out for a bit while trying to figure out what I wanted to do and they partially destroyed it.

TSC was having a bird feeder sale, so I replaced the old one with an all metal, fine mesh feeder and a seed mix that's just millet and I think thistle seeds - tiny stuff. The squirrels so far just sniff it and leave, and my chickens have never been very interested in millet; not sure about chickens and the thistle seeds, but those seeds are so small I can't think the risk would be the same. So hopefully just less temptation all around, both on the chicken side and for whatever other critters were stashing stuff. The small birds that I wanted to entice away from my chicken enclosures like the new feeder, so the change seems like a win-win so far.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Important although sad adendum to this thread: the hen who had the impaction and recovered declined for other reasons and died today from a series of heart attacks. Some time after the impaction incident, it became clear there was some kind of other mass in her abdomen that was independent of her digestive sysem; I suspect it was either the result of internal laying or a tumor. In the past couple of weeks it was making it more challenging for her to pass things, so anything going in was moving through slowly. The reason I wanted to post that here is I have to think the previously hidden underlying condition was a factor in becoming impacted from the hulled seeds. I still think a rodent cache was likely what she got into, but my guess is a fully healthy bird would perhaps not have become impacted as she did.

 

[ChaosMom]

Important although sad adendum to this thread: the hen who had the impaction and recovered declined for other reasons and died today from a series of heart attacks. Some time after the impaction incident, it became clear there was some kind of other mass in her abdomen that was independent of her digestive sysem; I suspect it was either the result of internal laying or a tumor. In the past couple of weeks it was making it more challenging for her to pass things, so anything going in was moving through slowly. The reason I wanted to post that here is I have to think the previously hidden underlying condition was a factor in becoming impacted from the hulled seeds. I still think a rodent cache was likely what she got into, but my guess is a fully healthy bird would perhaps not have become impacted as she did.

And that does make sense, that some internal growth compressed her digestive system, promoting compaction.

Thank you for updating.

 

[townchicks]

Sorry to hear that you lost her. Thanks for updating us.