No wonder she was weak and in pain! I noticed her drinking several times throughout the day, so felt like maybe she was making a little progress, but she would not eat at all-not even when I offered her more oatmeal. The newspapers under the crate were soaked with green tinged fluid-This bird’s stomach was so empty that all that was coming through was bile-tinged water. She hadn’t touched her food, so I mixed up some oatmeal and she gobbled that right up. I found maggots in the large lesion, but just a few this time. There were two maggot lesions near her vent. The next morning I gave Roxie a Betadine soak followed by a bath, a blow dry, and more Veterycin. But I certainly didn’t stop thinking about her. I gave her a couple drinks of the electrolyte solution using a syringe, but mostly left her alone. She showed no interest in the food or drink and simply roosted with her head and tail down and her eyes closed. I installed Roxie into this space and she hopped onto the roost and didn’t budge. Then I set up a sick-room in the basement: I put newspapers under a dog crate and furnished the dog crate with a piece of 4x4 for a roost, a dish with some chicken crumbles, and a small water fount filled with a probiotic/electrolyte solution to get her diarrhea under control. I trimmed the feathers around all the bad spots and treated them all with Veterycin, a veterinary antiseptic. There were a couple sizable maggot-eaten lesions around her vent. I immediately carried her to the house, took her to the laundry room, and bathed her several times in dog shampoo and water, removing all the poop and maggots that I could find. Roxie’s back end was teeming with maggots. A hen can go from normal to fly-blown in 24 hours, and can go from fly-blown to dead in an equally short period of time. When the maggots hatch, they immediately burrow into the chicken’s skin and create bloody skin lesions that are laden with thousands of maggots. So the female fly deposits her eggs on the poop-laden feathers. Here’s the part you don’t want to read if you’re squeamish: Sometimes in the summertime certain flies find their way to hens who are suffering from diarrhea. But there was a lot of poopy feathers on her back side, so I flipped her over to take a closer look and then audibly gasped. Her eyes were bright, her comb was a nice bright red, and both her crop and her abdomen felt normal-neither puffy nor distended. So I corralled the little red hen and picked her up for a quick exam. This definitely raised my level of concern. FlystrikeĪ few days later as I was cleaning the coop, I noticed Roxie make a couple of attempts to hop the short distance into a nest box and fail at both attempts. ![]() Roxie seemed bright-eyed and active so my concern for her was mild at most. Hens get diarrhea-sometimes it’s just due to the heat or “something they ate” and sometimes it’s due to something more serious. When I spot this on just one hen and it’s a new thing, I keep a watchful eye, but I certainly don’t panic. ![]() Diarrhea is hard to miss-you notice the loose stools in the coop, and you can spot the perpetrator by finding the chicken with soiled feathers on her backside. The first sign that something was wrong with Roxie the Rhode Island Red was the diarrhea. Please check them, grit your teeth and do what you think is best. Ironic isn’t it? If you’ve run across my post in your own Google quest for information, my sources are all linked. ![]() And I’m telling this tale on the internet. It is also the tale of my search for the needle of truth about a confusing chicken disease and its treatment in the haystack of conflicting information on the internet. ![]() If you’ve read the previous post, you are totally justified in skipping the first couple of paragraphs. I’ve excerpted a lot of stuff from a previous post I wrote on this situation called, “Baseball, Sick Chickens, and Love” in order to tell the complete narrative here. This is the saga of how one tenacious little red hen at death's door fought her way back to the land of the living.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |