Recent content by Swbertrand1

Hey Dobie! Nice to hear from you after so long! Thank you for the reply. She definitely had something going on as she didn't lay for months, then expelled what you see in the photos. We have now collected over a dozen of her eggs and needed a trusted word on whether they were ok to eat...

Hey everyone. I'm not really finding what I'm looking for, thus the new post regarding safety of eggs. A roughly 5-yr old Golden Comet layer has produced for years. About October of last year she stopped laying altogether. Fast-forward to February 2024 and she lays what I believe is a Lash...

Sorry to hear the chick passed - it happens to all of us however. I wouldn't squeeze any part of a chick. The "swelling" you felt may have been the chick's vent unless it was somewhere else. The vent contains a muscle much like the sphincter in humans - don't squeeze the sphincter! :-)

Kiki, You might add this link for the fee schedule to the NC necropsy link in your post above: https://www.ncagr.gov/vet/ncvdl/feebrochure.pdf S

If we lose another, namely the other Comet, I think we MUST get a necropsy done. Our flock is pretty closed now and has pretty much always been that way; we're diligent about quarantine and don't just bring new birds in for the sake of having more birds.

Here are a few photos, taken in the last 30 minutes, of our remaining Golden Comet, Juice. She rules the roost... Her sister that we put down the other night looked exactly like her up until about 2 weeks ago, bright-eyed, feathers all in place, eyes sharp and open. We had to put bands on them...

Yes. The fee is $30 per bird + $25 disposal + we have to get the bird to the lab (either a 2-hour drive each way, or shipped). It's not really workable for us.

We wouldn't be able to discern an overly large liver from an overly small liver, but we did address ascites in this same hen last week, draining about 400ml of yellow fluid from her abdomen. That's what I thought about Mareks, but it makes sense that it could present at any time if the bird has...

Thank you. The Golden Comets (we had three; one was killed by a dog in a freak incident, then this one with the euthanasia a few nights ago, and we still have 1) came from a seller in SE North Carolina that buys chicks in bulk from a hatchery, but we're unsure if those chicks were vaccinated...

That helps; thank you. This hen was approaching her 5th "birthday" (July). Wouldn't Mareks have presented before then? We have no other birds that have shown any symptoms of either Mareks or LL and all of the flock is in the 3-6 year-old range, save one Silkie that just hit the 2 year mark in...

What is LL?

UPDATE: This came from my uncle, a retired Head of Pathology at a major Virginia hospital system. We sent him the same photos that you see above. This was his response: l can't identify the origin of the primary tumor mass so it is hard to say what kind of tumor it is. If it came from the...

Thank you to the two of you that have replied! I'd love to hear some more thoughts on this :-)

Having raised lots of Silkies, this is not uncommon with them. They can have toes that are turned upside down with the claw facing upward, and so on. In your girl's case, the toe looks broken. Can you verify if the bone is intact or not? I know the chick is young and the bones will be soft...

You would have never known. She was active, happy, and did all the other things that the rest of our flock did.