Life is not all about treats, cute faces and beautiful eggs when you’re a chicken mom. Oh and let’s not forget about chicks, and broody hens who surprise you with a new chick every now and then, and watching a sweet incubator hatching, and feathered mobs rushing your porch every morning…
Chickens can have health drama.
2 days ago, Floppy wasn’t up in the roosts at bedtime with her friends. She was kind of dazed, a little lethargic and very, overly people friendly. We knew something was off but we weren’t sure what. We have a checklist we go through when trying to figure out what’s wrong with a chicken. Is s/he pooping. What color is their comb. Can they walk. Can they stand. How’s their breathing. How do their eyes look. Those few questions narrow our course of action down significantly…there are 4 main concerns that we have when dealing with an oddly acting chicken.
Is she egg bound?
Every once in a while, due to a calcium deficiency, stress, a rare double-yoked egg and sometimes illness, a hen will be unable to lay an egg. Which will kill them. Think about it, the egg is in there until you help her get it out. If you don’t, and she can’t, she will die. Our first hen loss was in this way. Penelope, she was one of the 9 original chickens that came with our property, courtesy of the previous owners. We worked for 3 days to help her, and she was working too. We gave her warm epsom salt baths to relax her, making sure her backend was submerged. We made a little bed for her, a little bigger than a nesting box with a towel over top to give her a relaxing dark place to sleep. We even applied Preparation H to her since she had been working so hard for so long, to help ease some of her local pain from pushing. We worked really hard, and so did she. But to no avail. The loss was particularly tough.
Could it be Marek’s Disease?
This is a viral disease of poultry, primarily chickens. It can cause partial or total paralysis of the legs, wings, and even neck, it creates tumors in the body (often near nerves which causes the paralysis), blindness and death. It’s spread through dander so it’s a serious concern for us. If one chicken has it, they all will have it. But just having the disease doesn’t mean they’ll show symptoms, therefore all new members of our flock are required to be vaccinated and we will no longer be taking in rescues due to learning about it. So on that note, the first thing we’d look for is leg, wing or neck paralysis. And go from there.
Chickens get colds and flus just like humans do.
Wheezing. If there’s any wheezing or one eye is cloudy, they’re going into our homemade chicken hospital to begin intravenous antibiotics. We have had amazing success with 1cc of Duramycin 72-200, twice a day. We’ve had Claire, Newman and Ruby all make a full recovery after 5 days of treatment. Which makes a chicken mom feel really good!
Could it be chicken crop issue?
A sour or impacted crop is always a concern. The crop is basically the holding area for food before it travels to the stomach. We’ll often comment on a chickens’ “food boob” being especially large after a big meal, it’s because the thing is packed with food waiting to be digested and they’ve clearly had an amazing meal. A sour crop happens when the crop is never fully emptied, which means there’s old food in there fermenting, which results in a bacterial / yeast infection within the crop. Sounds pretty gross, because it is. Long grasses, excessive amounts of bread and pasta, moldy food and inadequate amounts of grit can cause this.
Since our chickens free-frange, a lack of grit is not an issue, but undigestible pieces of manmade material is, little pieces of plastic or a rubber band, which is how an impacted crop can happen. A strange object is blocking the crop from being emptied. Chickens are nosy, they’ll peck at anything. This is why I give the chickens a large bowl of yogurt a couple times a month. To keep things moving, keep a steady flow of good bacteria going. And I don’t often give them bread or pasta, which doesn’t offer much nutrition anyway. An impacted crop will feel hard and the sour crop will feel soft, and the best time to check is first thing in the morning, if the chicken is lethargic, since the crop is emptied almost completely overnight.
And none of these applied to Floppy…
Her lethargy and death happened abnormally fast. We found her standing on the coop floor, not even facing a corner (which chickens do when they’re sick) just staring at us. She had no symptoms of anything, aside from just wanting to curl up into a ball. She seemed dazed. Her crop was a little mushy, but not overly so. We gave her a epsom salt bath anyway. She would not open her beak for anything. We placed her in a dark warm corner with a towel. And she died peacefully the next morning. We think she must’ve eaten something poisonous. She was only a year old. It was really sad, and strange. We buried her next to Penelope at the south end of our property.
