I found bugs on my hen...what do. do

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Harrison farm

Harrison farm

In the Brooder
Jan 3, 2016
48
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I went out to my coop and found one of my hens with bad gout. I know it was gout because I just had to put one of my other hens down for this a few months back
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. I decided I did not want the meat to go to waste so I was going to butcher her for the dinner table. When I picked her up I felt something crawling on my arm. It was a tiny tiny little brown bug. UGH Sorry for such details but we are new to raising chickens and where we live at below zero temps I didn't know we could get bugs. Can anyone tell me what this might be and how to treat it. We have 26 other hens and 1 rooster that we need to check and figure out how to treat if they are infected. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
 
They were about the size of the ink part of a pen. They had a dust bath but refused to use it and it ended up just being where they liked to poo
 
Thanks for the link. What do you use for your dust baths? I used regular child grade sandbox sand is there something else that would work better?
 
I use wood ash and DE and mine basically just stand in there and poop too! Mine free range though and they always find a dry area under something and do their dust bathing outside. I think mine hate DE...I do too, it's very drying to my hands, it must feel bad to them on their skin too. If mine couldn't free range I thought I would give them a bigger dust bathing area.
 
Thanks again for the information our chickens have a large fenced area and free roam there but it's -2° today where we live and they don't care too much for the cold or snow
 
Here is a list of causes for chicken mites (that I know of)in order of importance:
1. Bedding! Bedding is so important! Chicken mites lay eggs in chicken poop so it's very important to clean your coop. Also clean your nesting boxes.
Coops need to be cleaned every 7 days. If you don't have time to clean your coop once or twice, just clean the poop out and dust the coop with DE, that should buy you around another 3 days until you can clean all the bedding out. Larger flocks will need their coop cleaned out more often.
I CANNOT stress enough the massive importance of cleaning your coop often!!!!
2. This topic has already been covered on this post but Dust Baths are important.
If your chickens are already dust bathing when they free roam they should be good for their dust fix.
 

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