GracieKatt
Chirping
- Mar 18, 2021
- 24
- 36
- 66
So Saturday May 8th I bought 4 chicks from a local farm that seemed to have their s*** together. On Sunday May 9th, one of them took sick. The farmer insisted that it was "sour crop" while giving me instructions for clearing an *impacted* crop and she told me it was because of the feed I fed them which was DuMor, from Tractor Supply. I didn't know any better so I believed her. We're going to call that chick Chick 1 and its symptoms were:
1. Having a lot of foamy-looking spit in its beak, which would splash out when it would shake its head; slowly opening and closing its beak while slowly nodding its head up and down with its eyes half closed.
Within a week that chick was dead.
She gave me another chick to replace that one and so I had four again, but that chick and another chick took sick straight away after the first one died.
Chick 2. also moved its head up and down and opened and closed its beak, but no foam, and its right eye became swollen and closed up.
Chick 3, the replacement chick (which never ate any of the feed she said was the cause of Chick 1's death) was behaving totally normally, but her right eye swelled up hugely and closed.
Everybody's poop looks pretty normal to me most of the time, to maybe a little puddly on occasion. It's brown with a little white, looks like bird poop to me.
I got Terramycin for the eyes and after calling several vets was finally able to find one that would listen to what was wrong with the chicks and prescribe something. I picked up a bottle of L-S 50 antibiotics from them two days ago and have been administering them in the water to all chicks. Two chicks which haven't shown any signs of any infection are now in one brooder and the two sick ones are in another brooder.
Today, both the sick chicks are acting really normal and there's no more foam or lethargic behavior, but this one still has this huge egg behind her eye. Her eye is open and looks MUCH better, but still huge and swollen and when I gently lift up her eyelid a bit you can see through the tissue inside the swollen eye cavity, there's something big and white behind there. I've been told maybe MG and maybe Infectious Coryza, but I don't know if I'm just supposed to give them the antibiotics and it will take care of this eye, or if something will need to be done about the stuff making the whole eye area swell up. I think we've all seen the video of the guy in Africa cutting open the chicken's eye and getting all the hard pus like stuff out and I'm wondering if something like that will have to be done to get this stuff out from behind the eye socket or if the antibiotics will take care of it. Here are some photos of the chick showing the swelling. The first one is from Monday, before the antibiotics, and the other three are all from today. It's hard to tell in the top-down photo because my hand is light in color and so is her head, but if you squint you can really see that the right-front side of her head is still very swollen.
Now, the woman at the farm continues to insist that the first chick died from sour crop because I fed them DuMor feed and that these two are sick from something else completely different because of however I'm keeping them. How I'm keeping them is:
- in two very large plastic tubs with the bottoms lined with brown paper and then covered in wood shavings, which I change every other day
- with a stick to perch on and a little loft area made from a cardboard box cut in half so they can hide under it or go on top of it and then hop off
- a bowl for food which I clean thoroughly any time any poop gets on it,
- both a watering dish with the mason jar screwed in to the top and a hanging nipple waterer, so they have options, which are both changed and cleaned every day (the dish I clean out every time I notice they got any poop in it which can be 2-3x in a day)
- between 80-90 during the day, at night it's not below 60 outside at night and their brooders in a closed room with no air conditioning and I have the heat plate set up on one side of both brooders. On top of that side of each brooder is a thin sheer curtain which I leave mostly open during the warm days and mostly pulled over the top of the brooder at night, to keep some of that heat in.
I've asked several friends who've kept chickens for many years and they've all said my setup is fine for chicks and I'm doing the same things that they've always done, but this woman says things like that you should NEVER keep chicks indoors and you must change their water every hour on the hour and that's why they're sick. She also told me these chicks were 5-8 weeks old when I bought them, then later changed that to 4 weeks when I bought them and has stuck with that despite everyone on the BYC facebook group and my sister all telling me there's NO WAY they were remotely that old already. So it does seem like I was keeping them at a somewhat too cool temperature for their age, for the first week.
So to sum up I have all of these questions
1. Will the antibiotics take care of this eye thing, or will something need to be done to remove whatever is in there causing this swelling?
2. Does anyone think they know what these three chicks were sick with?
3. Is there anything I should do to find out whether this woman is really just selling sick chicks and doesn't want to get caught, is there some way I'm supposed to report infected chicks, should I be telling someone I bought chicks from this place and they're all infected with something, etc? What would you do?
4. Does anyone live in Dekalb County, Alabama or the bordering areas of Georgia or Tennessee and know of a veterinarian who will actually see and treat chickens? I can't believe it but I can't find any! I'll go anywhere within about a 40-minute drive of zip code 35984.
1. Having a lot of foamy-looking spit in its beak, which would splash out when it would shake its head; slowly opening and closing its beak while slowly nodding its head up and down with its eyes half closed.
Within a week that chick was dead.
She gave me another chick to replace that one and so I had four again, but that chick and another chick took sick straight away after the first one died.
Chick 2. also moved its head up and down and opened and closed its beak, but no foam, and its right eye became swollen and closed up.
Chick 3, the replacement chick (which never ate any of the feed she said was the cause of Chick 1's death) was behaving totally normally, but her right eye swelled up hugely and closed.
Everybody's poop looks pretty normal to me most of the time, to maybe a little puddly on occasion. It's brown with a little white, looks like bird poop to me.
I got Terramycin for the eyes and after calling several vets was finally able to find one that would listen to what was wrong with the chicks and prescribe something. I picked up a bottle of L-S 50 antibiotics from them two days ago and have been administering them in the water to all chicks. Two chicks which haven't shown any signs of any infection are now in one brooder and the two sick ones are in another brooder.
Today, both the sick chicks are acting really normal and there's no more foam or lethargic behavior, but this one still has this huge egg behind her eye. Her eye is open and looks MUCH better, but still huge and swollen and when I gently lift up her eyelid a bit you can see through the tissue inside the swollen eye cavity, there's something big and white behind there. I've been told maybe MG and maybe Infectious Coryza, but I don't know if I'm just supposed to give them the antibiotics and it will take care of this eye, or if something will need to be done about the stuff making the whole eye area swell up. I think we've all seen the video of the guy in Africa cutting open the chicken's eye and getting all the hard pus like stuff out and I'm wondering if something like that will have to be done to get this stuff out from behind the eye socket or if the antibiotics will take care of it. Here are some photos of the chick showing the swelling. The first one is from Monday, before the antibiotics, and the other three are all from today. It's hard to tell in the top-down photo because my hand is light in color and so is her head, but if you squint you can really see that the right-front side of her head is still very swollen.
Now, the woman at the farm continues to insist that the first chick died from sour crop because I fed them DuMor feed and that these two are sick from something else completely different because of however I'm keeping them. How I'm keeping them is:
- in two very large plastic tubs with the bottoms lined with brown paper and then covered in wood shavings, which I change every other day
- with a stick to perch on and a little loft area made from a cardboard box cut in half so they can hide under it or go on top of it and then hop off
- a bowl for food which I clean thoroughly any time any poop gets on it,
- both a watering dish with the mason jar screwed in to the top and a hanging nipple waterer, so they have options, which are both changed and cleaned every day (the dish I clean out every time I notice they got any poop in it which can be 2-3x in a day)
- between 80-90 during the day, at night it's not below 60 outside at night and their brooders in a closed room with no air conditioning and I have the heat plate set up on one side of both brooders. On top of that side of each brooder is a thin sheer curtain which I leave mostly open during the warm days and mostly pulled over the top of the brooder at night, to keep some of that heat in.
I've asked several friends who've kept chickens for many years and they've all said my setup is fine for chicks and I'm doing the same things that they've always done, but this woman says things like that you should NEVER keep chicks indoors and you must change their water every hour on the hour and that's why they're sick. She also told me these chicks were 5-8 weeks old when I bought them, then later changed that to 4 weeks when I bought them and has stuck with that despite everyone on the BYC facebook group and my sister all telling me there's NO WAY they were remotely that old already. So it does seem like I was keeping them at a somewhat too cool temperature for their age, for the first week.
So to sum up I have all of these questions
1. Will the antibiotics take care of this eye thing, or will something need to be done to remove whatever is in there causing this swelling?
2. Does anyone think they know what these three chicks were sick with?
3. Is there anything I should do to find out whether this woman is really just selling sick chicks and doesn't want to get caught, is there some way I'm supposed to report infected chicks, should I be telling someone I bought chicks from this place and they're all infected with something, etc? What would you do?
4. Does anyone live in Dekalb County, Alabama or the bordering areas of Georgia or Tennessee and know of a veterinarian who will actually see and treat chickens? I can't believe it but I can't find any! I'll go anywhere within about a 40-minute drive of zip code 35984.
