4 chicks dead...newbie taking it hard

[jennifersouza]

4 of our chicks were killed, and just left. What is doing this? 3 are gone all together. My husband is the expert, but he's out of town all week, so he can't give his expert opinion. I don't want to lose any more!

 

[patman75]

sorry about your loss.

We need a little more info to help you out. When did it happen? What type of coop and fencing was used? How did the predator get in to the coop?

 

[mysweetgypsy]

Sorry about your babies. I'm no wildlife biologist, but I bet someone on here is! Give more info and maybe someone can help you. Damage, where they were when you found them, where they were last night?

I know we had a wolfhybrid years ago that cleaned out an entire coop, (not our coop-that's how we got him, it was us or death

) Most of the chickens died from shock I guess, he only physically killed two of them. The others just dropped dead from frieght I guess. We "rehabilitated" him and he lived with our birds for years, even protected them.

Unfortuently chickens seem very fragile and sensitive, so I think sometimes they just can't cope with the scare. I know I try to keep mine as stress free as possible

 

[jennifersouza]

Ah, thanks for the coaching. Well, we're in rural Brazil and like everyone else, our chickens and roosters are in our yard. We have a little indoor area that is not secure- the chickens come and go. I am not sure when it happenned..sometime over the weekend. We were at our even more rural farm and I came home to the missing/dead chicks. They are still out there...I know my husband is going to want to see them so I haven't moved them. There is no visible damage, other than one looks like an extended backwards neck position.

 

[jennifersouza]

And the predator was...the rain! A farmer friend stopped by and I showed him the chicks. First, he said let's clean them up b/c the will stink soon and the chickens will start to eat them. Then he said, it's the heavy rain we had for sure. They drowned.

OMG!

Why didn't they go into their little house like they do every night?

 

[dufus]

i've heard of turkeys drowning in the heavy rain, or ''old wives tales'' about this. i have never heard of a chicken doing this,, but,, maybe they will.

 

[Redcatcher]

Unless there were deep puddles, the chicks likely got wet and died of hypothermia. They aren't always smart enough to seek shelter and they might not if they were bullied by larger chickens and had to compete with them for the indoor area. Chicks and chickens will die some contorted positions and it doesn't sound like anything out of the ordinary.

 

[jennifersouza]

Thanks, everyone. Unfortunately, we have very, very deep puddles when it rains here. We live in the area of Brazil that used to be the Rainforest and is a frontier town, so we this awful soil and no drainage. But I wasn't here, so I don't know. Hypothermia is a possibility, too, as we have had a cold snap down into the 40's-50's (I'm estimating.) Thanks again. It helped me knowing there was assistance out there. EVERYONE here knows chickens really, really well but I don't know enough Portuguese to know what the heck they are telling me. We don't have a lot of the problems American chickens do (like eating inappropriate/poisonous things) but I so appreciate this forum! I'm also learning everything about chickens in Portuguese, so it's nice to be here to learn the English words for things.