- Feb 2, 2016
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After https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/easter-egger-moulting-question.1416928/ a 1.5 yr old buckeye started moulting and I found a blob of blood on a new feather shaft, so I separated her with the other one. Unfortunately, I didn't notice the sun was getting low enough to not completely dry out the whole area until I started smelling mouldy grass. Ivory had diarrhea. I moved them to full sun and gave her yeast-fighting stuff and probiotics, and she improved, and has been gaining her weight back, but the Buckeye then had diarrhea. Instead of improving on the same treatment, it became water only. Docusate sodium, calcium and magnesium didn't work. I tried baking soda flush, and the tube pulled out something like haylage.
She then improved on the treatment, along with extra calcium and magnesium, but while her weight loss slowed, she was still losing weight. Remembering that coccidia multiplies fast in wet grass, unsure if I found coccidia oocysts in the fecals, and considering the age of the birds, I put them on corid last night. Unfortunately, it seems to be competing with the probiotics, making Ivory's droppings wet again.
Here's the Buckeye's latest
Here's Ivory's latest (I picked off the top white part with a leaf, and smooshed it out, before thinking of taking a picture.) The top right corner is still wet from a very wet one with almost no solids after the buckeye drank a lot of the corid water.
Any advice? Should I keep up the probiotics and corid both, discontinue one or the other, or do something else? I'm looking into fecal float testing for coccidia, so links for that would be appreciated, as well. I saw some very small things at 300x that resembled pictures of coccidia oocysts in a slide that had dried a few hours, but when I went back to confirm, I couldn't find what I thought I saw, and haven't found them in new floats...so far... I thought about trying ACV as well, in case that would help the gut Flora...
Here's the Buckeye's latest
Here's Ivory's latest (I picked off the top white part with a leaf, and smooshed it out, before thinking of taking a picture.) The top right corner is still wet from a very wet one with almost no solids after the buckeye drank a lot of the corid water.
Any advice? Should I keep up the probiotics and corid both, discontinue one or the other, or do something else? I'm looking into fecal float testing for coccidia, so links for that would be appreciated, as well. I saw some very small things at 300x that resembled pictures of coccidia oocysts in a slide that had dried a few hours, but when I went back to confirm, I couldn't find what I thought I saw, and haven't found them in new floats...so far... I thought about trying ACV as well, in case that would help the gut Flora...