Recent content by StPaulieGirls

Hey, folks. Thanks in advance for any experience you can share with this. We have one of our feral peas indoors recovering from frostbite. These are stray birds that took up residence on our Minnesota farm, so I am not at fault for the frostbite, but I still feel responsible for caring for...

Hello peafolks, Once again, I'm embroiled in the drama of our local feral peafowl. A stray peahen laid eggs on our farm, right where our solar array was being installed in June. I rescued the eggs from the wheels of the Bobcat and incubated them thinking the hen might come back around (she...

A vet isn't an option, I'm afraid. The only avian vet within a 3-hour drive isn't accepting new clients. We also don't have the money to spend. Would a dislocation make the whole leg and foot floppy? She may have dislocated it by limping/dragging the leg, or worse, maybe I did something to...

Hi friends, We've got a year-old Ancona duck female who we've been treating for mild bumblefoot for 5 days. We're doing Epsom salts and Tricide Neo soaks twice daily. The bumbles never got huge or nasty, so we didn't debride them. This morning, the bumbles look better BUT her right leg has no...

Yes, if we lose another bird, we'll definitely send in for testing. The breeder did the vaccinations. We got birds from her last year and were incredibly impressed with their health and vigor. But this year, there seems to be an issue. I've never had Marek's in my flock, and sort of imagined...

The breeder just replied to a message I sent saying that another farm that bought her birds has lost 4 to paralysis and she's lost 2, but she doesn't know why. So sad.

We give them clean food and water three times a day. They're on the same patch of grass that we grew our pullets out on this time last year, and those birds were so healthy. I'll give the pen a once-over for anything untoward.

Is something miserable just getting started in our flock, friends? We've got 8-week old Buckeyes, on grass, organic grower rations. Vaccinated for Marek's. Three days ago, we found a bird paralyzed, legs and one wing. One leg tended to stretch out, and the toes of the other curled, so we...

We've seen it all connected in a couple of our birds, but the direction of causality is kind of a mystery. For us it looked like stopped laying --> really hard molt --> (funny business in the food/egg tract?) --> impacted crop. We ended up doing crop surgery, and she started laying perfect...

She's still alive. Eats well, poops weird chalky poops, keeps weight on, but the skin thing is persistent. Her eyes and ears get bad when it flares up. Our best guess is that she's got some combination of a genetic weakness and a really bad case of favus. We've tried everything. She's isolated...

Argh, friends...I'm mostly looking for sympathy. We performed a very successful (but stressful) surgery on our year-old barred rock to clear an impacted mess of grass out of her crop. She recovered beautifully and was inside with us for three weeks post-surgery because we had that wicked cold...

Oh, my word, folks. We just did crop surgery on our impacted hen, and it was just miserably stressful on all parties. I have never intentionally inflicted pain like that on another creature in my whole life. Definitely a three-person job in this household. We were well-prepared in terms of...

We've been doing 35 cc so as not to cause her discomfort. We could maybe do 50, but we'd also have to reload the syringe, which takes some doing, and all the while she has the tube down her gullet. The local feed store is out of larger slip syringes. She's also eating *very* wet gruel -...

That's helpful, @casportpony - we'll up our fluids starting tomorrow. Thanks. I'm reading old threads about the apparent connection between hard molts and impacted crops. I'm wondering, if we can see her through the molt with all these fluids and liquid nutrition, maybe her body will rally and...

We're in the same boat with a molting 1-year-old. We're keeping her energy up by hydrating her with tube-administered fluids and electrolytes, but not having any luck getting the impaction to break up and move. I'm glad you live where it's warm! We're in the middle of a cold spell in MN: -8F...