5-week old chick dead within 1 hour with massive size crop

[CanadaEh]

Everything looked normal, than found 1 chick dead when came back one hour later . No signs of injury, crop is huge and soft, some soft liquid food in the throat. Necropsy has showed no obvious blockages, the crop was huge like that of adult bird and filled with soft food. The crop size was may be about 6 times the outer size of the gizzard that contained little food.

Could the cause of the death be overeating and throat blockage or puking causing suffocation and does it happen often? They were given ground fish scraps and they usually don't gorge on them having contain lots of liquid.

 

[Wyorp Rock]

Sorry about your chick.
If the crop was large and the gizzard empty when you performed a necropsy, I would suspect a blockage. Do you have photos of the necropsy?

I would not say overeating and blockage/suffocation happens often. It could happen though just like 100s of other things.

Do you provide grit (crushed granite) for your birds?

 

[CanadaEh]

there was no blockage and there was some food in the gizzard (also I am not sure how much food it is supposed to be there as I have never butchered birds at this age). The grit was provided and there was some in the gizzard again don't know how much supposed to be there. I have updated the grit after this event just in case they have run out of the pieces they found most suitable.