chickensins
Chirping
- Jul 18, 2016
- 12
- 5
- 57
Hello, first of all let me start out by saying I/we made a mistake by not writing this sooner and that is my fault, I acknowledge that.
Our flock consists mostly of jersey giant mixes and lives in an old stable rather than a coop. We had one jg rooster from a less than savory place who liked to mate with his own daughters/resulting granddaughters so all of our black and grey hens as well as our current rooster is the product of unknown amounts of jg inbreeding.
Around two weeks ago we noticed four of our hens (one acting "sickly") and our large but very panicky rooster had pale shrunken combs. we passed it of as nothing with the others and put the sickly hen somewhere else with food and drink next to her until the sickly hen was dead one morning then we started taking it seriously. We took pictures of the remaining hens (luckily one of each color we own so it's easy for me to refer to specific ones) and rooster and gave the entire flock of 12 birds in total a mouthful each of antibiotics for three days straight. And nothing really changed except one hen who we didn't even think was sick suddenly got an insanely red comb so maybe she had some unrelated issue that was unintentionally fixed. Unfortunately I/we ****ed something up while transferring the photos so the quality is terrible but:
The black hen always looks absolutely awful when she's molting each year, going nearly bald with severe comb shrinkage but she usually bounces right back as soon as she gets her feathers, but this time it's like she just kept her molting comb (so maybe she or the others has been pale for longer and we just didn't notice, my memory is hazey and it's usually my family who take care of the birds). She is also one the if not the largest hen and used to be more dominant.
Roosters previous injuries: A few months ago the rooster fell, seemingly flat on his face on a stable floor, from his perch when we accidentally startled him (again, he's a very easily scared) while in the stable at night and he has been unable to jump up there since around that time, but we don't know if that's a leg injury from the fall and his size (he has a bent comb limps a little now) or from a form of sickness because for the longest time he was mysteriously missing his outermost feathers in the middle of his wing. I was told "oh it's growing back out, look!", it didn't, and now it's both wings. But he acts like one wing is sore when held. And he HATES being examined. So we blamed him being unable to get to his perch on a leg injury and missing wing feathers combined with being a heavy bird and the wings on his inbred genetics. We know the fall was very hard on him because for a few days after that he couldn't stretch his neck completely but thankfully that passed. He also had what looked like bumblefoot before the fall wich we tried to operate but he showed too much pain and we let him go after getting of the "scab".
Here are pictures we tried to take of his wings that day we took the rest but I don't know if the quality is too shit.
Our flock consists mostly of jersey giant mixes and lives in an old stable rather than a coop. We had one jg rooster from a less than savory place who liked to mate with his own daughters/resulting granddaughters so all of our black and grey hens as well as our current rooster is the product of unknown amounts of jg inbreeding.
Around two weeks ago we noticed four of our hens (one acting "sickly") and our large but very panicky rooster had pale shrunken combs. we passed it of as nothing with the others and put the sickly hen somewhere else with food and drink next to her until the sickly hen was dead one morning then we started taking it seriously. We took pictures of the remaining hens (luckily one of each color we own so it's easy for me to refer to specific ones) and rooster and gave the entire flock of 12 birds in total a mouthful each of antibiotics for three days straight. And nothing really changed except one hen who we didn't even think was sick suddenly got an insanely red comb so maybe she had some unrelated issue that was unintentionally fixed. Unfortunately I/we ****ed something up while transferring the photos so the quality is terrible but:
The black hen always looks absolutely awful when she's molting each year, going nearly bald with severe comb shrinkage but she usually bounces right back as soon as she gets her feathers, but this time it's like she just kept her molting comb (so maybe she or the others has been pale for longer and we just didn't notice, my memory is hazey and it's usually my family who take care of the birds). She is also one the if not the largest hen and used to be more dominant.
Roosters previous injuries: A few months ago the rooster fell, seemingly flat on his face on a stable floor, from his perch when we accidentally startled him (again, he's a very easily scared) while in the stable at night and he has been unable to jump up there since around that time, but we don't know if that's a leg injury from the fall and his size (he has a bent comb limps a little now) or from a form of sickness because for the longest time he was mysteriously missing his outermost feathers in the middle of his wing. I was told "oh it's growing back out, look!", it didn't, and now it's both wings. But he acts like one wing is sore when held. And he HATES being examined. So we blamed him being unable to get to his perch on a leg injury and missing wing feathers combined with being a heavy bird and the wings on his inbred genetics. We know the fall was very hard on him because for a few days after that he couldn't stretch his neck completely but thankfully that passed. He also had what looked like bumblefoot before the fall wich we tried to operate but he showed too much pain and we let him go after getting of the "scab".
Here are pictures we tried to take of his wings that day we took the rest but I don't know if the quality is too shit.
