Hard Day - Loss of a Loved Chick and Coccidiosis in the Chicken Run.
Yesterday was kind of a hard day on the compound. I won’t bore you with details, but just to give you an idea - while I was making lunch for the kids after their last day of school, I dropped an egg directly onto the floor HVAC vent - it was that kind of a day. So on those kinds of days, a loss is extra difficult.
Around 4pm I took some kitchen scraps to the chickens. I noticed one of the new chicks sitting in a corner and she didn’t come running. (She’s my new Welbar and supposed to lay the most beautiful red eggs starting in September.) She is also only about eight weeks old. We lost her hatch mate when they were just a few days old. No visible reason why - the tiny little chick just didn’t make it.
Prevent Coccidiosis with Vaccination
We lost both of our Welbars this spring :(
I picked her up and I noticed she had some poopy butt and she stank to high heaven. She was also not very excitable, which is immediately concerning. Yikes. I put her down and she had trouble standing up. Uh-oh. I brought her up to the house to give her bum a dip in warm water. She was pretty listless at this point and just let me handle her, so my concern started to grow. I dipped her in some Dawn and water three times and put her in a towel to let her dry off. I sat with her on my porch swing letting her dry off and she started to look worse and her breathing became shallow. Shit.
We hung out that way for awhile and the kids were there and my mom - and I told the kids we should name her before she dies, because she isn’t going ot make it until morning. They decided on Red Rover, since she would have laid red eggs.
I put her in the storage side of our coop for the evening to prevent her flock mates from picking on her. As mom and I pondered, we were leaning towards Coccidiosis. After speaking with my neighbor, who just had this run through her entire flock, we figured this is the most likely thing it could be.
While David got the kids ready for bed, Mom and I spent the next hour cleaning out and scrubbing down the coop, bleaching the areas around the water and feed dishes, scrubbing down the feeders and waterers and we replaced all the bedding, dust baths and checked all the girls and ground for signs of further infection. This morning Mom went out to buy medicine for them and we will treat their water for 5 days, making sure the coop and run are pretty spotless during this time.
Chickens do develop an immunity to this bacteria, but it develops over time, and so our youngest girls are at the highest risk.
We increased our flock in March and we knew as they grew they would be crowded in their run, so we have been diligently working to increase their space, but of course as seems to happen to us, we are too late for Red Rover.
My next blog post will be about the Top 10 Ailments for Backyard Chickens - how to prevent and treat them - in our local Sunnyvale and Dallas area. Stay tuned.
Was a tough day.
