achesney
In the Brooder
Hello,
I am a newbie!! This is my first batch of chicks, and I got a runt. I have two batches of chicks, one is a little over two weeks old, and one is almost a week old. My little Nugget is almost two weeks old, but a little bit smaller than my younger chicks. I almost lost her last week, but I have managed to save her to date so far. She is growing at a very slow rate, and her legs are still very scrawny. She is active in small doses, eats, and drinks fine, but she lays around a lot due to her legs not keeping up. This morning I noticed her crop was much larger than normal. Is this something to be concerned about since she is not as active as the other chicks? Sorry this picture is not the best quality, but I wanted to show the crop the best I could. Any advice would be appreciated, I really want my little Nugget to have a good quality life.
I would separate her to a separate brooder, just her, if you have another brooder. Remove food overnight and then in the morning palpate her crop to see if it's gone down. Our chicks had huge trouble with eating pine shavings so it might help to cover them again with paper towels. Monitor food and water dishes to make sure a lot of the bedding doesn't get in there. If the crop is still big after overnight and those measures it might be helpful to do a search on sour crop or impacted crop. Hope that helps !
