3rd chicken to die with this…. Has anyone else had this happen?

[ChickInnMama]

Good Morning,

In the last few months we’ve had 2 chickens have to be put down and now a third has the same issue. I’m just waiting for the vet to open to see if we can get her an appointment to be put down… what happens is their crop gets really hard and full, but you can still somewhat move it around like doughy but can’t get any fuller. Then we can get it to go down but then it gets sour, it will never completely empty and we can smell a septic type smell coming out of their beak. So it’s just not emptying, something blocks it from emptying. The first 2 chickens we lost were in a different coop (we have 2 small coops, one had 3 chickens and one had 5) and were bought at a different time. This one is not quite 3 years old, the other 2 were around a year and a half old. We were letting them free range in our yard, but after losing Evelyn and Charlotte we thought maybe it was something in our yard they’d gotten in to and I read an article by a long time chicken owner who said to rotational graze to cut down on parasites. So we made chicken tractors again and we’ve only let them out of their coops into the chicken tractors and we move it around once a week, they don’t go out every day (they have runs attached to their coops they are in most of the time). The only connected that I can make is that they were all either molting or starting or ending their molt when this happened. I’m not even going to try to treat Betty, it was an awful, long and drawn out process trying to treat our other two and they were miserable and starving to death. We’re just going to have her put down. When I was asking for help with my other two no one else had experienced this, but I wanted to check again and see if anyone else has and what caused it and what did you do? This is 3 chickens within about 3-4 months and we take really good care of our girls so I’m just at a loss. They get fresh water, access to feed (we switched them to purina, we were doing Nutrawise but it started smelling funky and they wouldn’t eat it)… they get dried mealworms every morning when I let them out, they also get some of the Impeckables (grains, veggies and fruit mix). We put them out on the grass when we can and they have clean coops. We live in Florida if that matters at all. Thanks so much, I am really hesitant to get any more chickens at this point. Until this started happening we have had a super healthy flock with hardly any issues. I have noticed that my girls don’t seem to be eating a much for months and my chickens haven’t been laying much since the beginning of summer but a ton of people around us (MidFlorida) are having the same issue with their chickens not laying so I haven’t thought much about that being part of the issue.

 

[AGeese]

Lots of people have. Were you speaking with people here on BYC? There's an article on Sour crop, and other crop related ailments under the articles button. Lots of topics started on similar issues.

I'm not the best rattling of advice for crop related issues, though I've experienced them. I tend to search, and bookmark multiple topics people have started on it.

Since you don't have a current sick bird, it's mostly speculation, but some others can give you some thoughts.

One thing to consider is what are you feeding them when they're not free ranging or in the tractors?

Another question is are you on a farm or where there could have been a lot of hardware spilled out on the ground that they could be picking up?

 

[Eggcessive]

How old are they? Do they have access to granite poultry grit in a separate container than food? Have you wormed them recently and what do you use? It may be a crop issue, which can also be related to reproductive disorders or a lack of grit. Your state vet at Kissimmee can do a thorough necropsy to look for a cause of death if you lose another one. Sorry for your loss.

 

[oldhenlikesdogs]

What breeds, and what do you feed? In my experiences crop problems are from things like a tumor that blocks the food from moving along in the digestive tract, and from foreign bodies in the crop. Things like string and nails and various things chickens will eat.

I ask what breed because higher production hens can be prone to reproductive cancers.

I ask what you feed because one year I was feeding some oatmeal and it caused problems with crops.

Seems deaths comes in threes around here. Not sure why. Sorry you lost your hens.

 

[ChickInnMama]

Thank you all, I’ll see if I can answer all the questions… I know about the articles on sour crop and impacted crops, I read the articles, we treated for both of those things and we got tons of instruction from people who have had issues with those 2 things, even the author of the articles. So I’m not sure that it is actually an impacted crop or sour crop, I’m just saying that issues were similar and when none of those things worked no one else said they’d had the same issue that we seemed to be having. They do have access to grit and oyster shell both and we’re currently feeding them Purina, we were giving them Nutriwise (I think that’s what it’s called) and they just didn’t seem interested in it anymore and it had taken on a really strong smell, it has herbs in it and I think they changed the formula because it was multiple bags and they just didn’t want to eat it. We don’t live on acres, we live in the rural-ish area on the outskirts of a city. We have about 1/3 acre and yes, we often find things on the ground that have just seemly come to the surface after being in the dirt and buried for a long time. That was actually what I was considering this morning as I sat and tried to talk it out with my husband to see if we could find a common denominator. The only common thing we could think of is that they were all molting when it started. But I’m really considering that they ate something they shouldn’t have. We have an older home (1979) and we have older homes to the sides and behind us as well… but we do find things often, even in the coop runs that have come to the surface and we grab it and throw it away. I’ve never had a house where we found stuff like we do here and it’s weird. We will find dried orange plastic (like they use to measure out areas etc), we found little bits of plastic and things that seem to have been used when our house was built or the houses around us and it was just left and buried. But we find those things all over our whole yard from time to time and we immediately pick them up. It honestly feels like instead of cleaning up after finishing the jobs they just chucked a big amount of dirt over stuff and left it. But we’ve had chickens for almost 3 years and we just started having issues? So weird. The vet wasn’t open today so we have Betty in a crate in our bathroom and I’ll try to get her in tomorrow. So frustrating