loose smelly poop in 3 and 4 week old chicks, just switched to organic

[HerbiLady]

I'm sure you didn't do anything really wrong. I'm sorry, but I don't know enough about crops yet to be able to give you any advice about that so do post on the emergency/illness forum about the hard crops.

If they were outside, they should have been picking up grit and they may have quite a bit in their crop. If you were giving them treats or anything besides crumbles without grit that can be bad. They have to have the grit to grind up anything besides crumbles but they should get that outside from the ground. If they were eating other stuff inside the brooder without regular access to grit, they may have an issue there.

Don't be too scared...they're acting normal, they're certainly warm enough and you're taking good care of them!

 

[pastrymama]

so i posted on the other forum and am waiting.....i have a backyard full of coarse sand so i put a ton in the bottom of their brooder and 2 little cups full also. i found out who else is my watery poo culprit. my other EE. ugh. not much else i can do. i am not about to do crop surgery. now i am kicking myself fornot putting this stupid sand in here sooner. what the hell was i thinking? i thought i was doing everything right and i may end up killing my birds for being stupid. i check on them about 50 times a day. thanks for all your help. i'll post in the morning and hope they are better. noel

 

[HerbiLady]

How are they today?

 

[pastrymama]

they seem fine still. they ate a ton of grit last night, my EE with the biggest problem is drinking a ton. her poo this morning is solid still, i see no shavings, but still a lot of fluid coming out with her poo. i can't feel any of their crops this morning, so i am assuming that is good. i only got one answer from the other forum and it was to just wait it out. so i guess at this point, it's a who the heck knows! but i won't be switching food so quickly ever again. funny that it only affected the 2 EEs and no one else. very strange. thank you again for sticking with me on this. i was driving my hubby CRAZY yesterday. he knows how i am about animals and i have had these buggers since day 4. hard to not like them. thanks so much herbilady. noel

 

[HerbiLady]

It's OK...I'm happy to offer what little help I can! I worry too...I'm having an issue with some feather picking and had one chick with a tail feather pulled out last night again so I had to spray her with blue-kote. Second one and it's really worrying me.

I think that water coming out ALONG WITH solid poop is probably perfectly normal. Do the poops look like the normal poops on the page link I gave you?

It's not abnormal for their crops to be full at night and then empty in the morning. I noticed that mine had HUGE crops last night...they got late evening treats of tuna fish and hard boiled egg and they went nuts over it. This morning, crops were not huge

I think that you don't even really start noticing big ol' crops till they get to be around this age...mine are two weeks today. They really need the grit though if they're packing those crops with anything other than chick crumbles

Little hogs!

If they're going at the grit, I'm sure they'll be fine! If they're actually passing stuff through, eating and drinking, that's a very good sign that they're probably OK and it was perhaps just a minor digestive upset from the food switch.

You shouldn't kick yourself though ... lots of stuff can happen with chicks and I think you're being a bit too hard on yourself. The important part is that you watch them so closely so you were there at the first sign of something different than "normal" and that's the best anyone of us can do

Good luck and let me know how they get on! And hold off with the scalpel doc...you're scaring me talking about surgery

 

[pastrymama]

well, i have a third chick now that started with super smelly rust colored goop. it's beginning just like the first EE, but this is one of my RIR. and my EE that was realy bad but seemed to be better, well, this afternoon her poo turned mush and full of water and had red stuff in it. ??????????? blood? i dunno. they have been outside several times, they do eat their own crap and my little EE was starting to act a little somber. so i called the feed store and asked what in the world do i do? he gave me sulmet and told me to seperate out the sick ones from the healthy ones and treat everyone. so that's what i spent the afternoon doing. he's thinking cocci and just coincidental about the new food. so the chicks that are sick are going crazy being seperated away from the other 3. they are chirping so loudly and running around like crazy, trying to fly through the wire roof of their brooder. crazy birds. if this doesn't work, then i will never buy unvaccinated birds again just because everything i read says you don't have to if you have a small flock that isn't going anywhere(like 4H or shows). these are my kids birds and if they die, oh they will be so upset. my girls are 6 and and my son is 4. what a horrible first experience this would be for them(and me). i realize that i will lose chickens the longer i do this, but no one wants to their first time out the gate. this stuff is supposed to work fast, so we will see how they do. noel

oh, i looked at the poo page and only sometimes would they have one that looked normal.otherwise, i couldn't find anything on there that resembled what is going on. that 's what has me tripped out.

 

[pastrymama]

so a 4th chick ended uo doing the same thing last night. they must have got something. and they were all so agitated that i seperated them that i put them back together to calm them down. then there was peace....this morning things seems a little better. i am still finding shavings coming out in the affected ones poo, so perhaps that has been it all along? plus a touch of cocci? i really have no clue. but my EE with the biggest problem made her first "normal" looking poo this morning so i think i would have to say they all caught something. so i am off to clean out the coop, top to bottom and thankfully it has a cement floor so i can spray it out.

hope you feather picking is no more. noel

 

[HerbiLady]

Hi Noel...

Oh my...I so hope it isn't the cocci

It's good that a normal poo happened so maybe they got into something or maybe the shavings irritated their systems. Or they caught something. Doesn't make any sense to separate them if they're all doing the same thing. It's hard on them to be so agitated and you want them to keep eating and drinking as much as possible.

At any rate, you're doing a good job!

I do the medicated feed and had them vaccinated for Marek's at the hatchery. I've not had chickens anywhere around my property since I moved there five years or so ago but I wasn't going to take any chances. I ordered 30 chicks so if something were to start it would spread like wildfire!

No pecking problems when I got home last night or this morning. I think the lower protein food combined with the stresses of the overheating the one day and the move right after to a new brooder where they were eating shavings probably created some havoc, I don't know

I also stopped with the starchy rice and oatmeal snacks for now.

I've been giving them some hard boiled egg every night (well, two eggs for 29 chicks!) and the last couple nights some canned tuna along with it and it was insane how they acted over the tuna! What a frenzy...it was crazy!!!

Maybe the tuna is satisfying them and that's why there's no more pecking right now. I also bought them new 20% feed yesterday so am mixing it with the 18% Sunfresh but I don't think the new one is medicated (DH went to get it) . I'm a little worried but the 18% Sunfresh is medicated so I'll just mix the two of them and hope that's enough medication fora few more weeks. They get vitamin water too.

Let me know how it goe with the rest of them too!

 

[pastrymama]

holy crap!!!!!!! now a 5th chick! so it got me thinking, i called O.H. Kruse Milling to see if it was maybe the food and they patched me through to the phoenix rep. i told him everything that was going on over the last 5 days and he said, "you most definately have without a doubt, coccidiosis." but no blood! he said you don't have to have blood, but if you see blood, you are really in trouble. so i hope we caught it in time. he said go buy the medicated starter, give them a new brooder and sanitize their coop. i just trashed all the hay this morning and hosed it out. now i need to bleach it i guess? he said they probably came into the farm stores with cocci already. super. i won't be buying chicks there again. my poor birds. and my husband makes fun of me for staring at them 50times a day. OCD yes, but i don't miss things. ok, i have to go get a new box and exchange the feed for new feed. oh vey. noel

 

[HerbiLady]

Ack! I"m so sorry!

I just got a great book in the mail today...The Chicken Health Handbook by Gail Damerow. It's awesome and REALLY comprehensive. It wasn't expensive through Amazon, like $12.00 I think for a brand new one.

I played it safe and started them with medicated feed and they're still on it and will be until they're at least 8 weeks old. The new higher protein isn't medicated, but DH didn't know. I'm mixing it with the lower protein medicated crumbles I had switched to, which I think contributed to my feather picking issue, which now seems to be solved.

My DH makes fun of me too for spending so much time with my birds, but how else are you going to know what's going on? I'm not completely sure he realizes yet how much money we've already invested in them but I certainly do! And I so don't want to be completely discouraged by not catching something in time...I was pretty discouraged with the feather picking because I was so paranoid that everyday I'd find a new bloody chick but thankfully, I haven't seen it for three or four days now.

The bleach should disinfect everything pretty well except for maybe the housing itself so I'd definitely trade that out if you're using a box. If you have a brooder or coop to disinfect, the book says something with either iodine, quat, phenol or cresol but bleach is good for everything else. Make sure that you wash or don't use again any gloves or clothing that you used when you were handling them.

Good luck with it