Hi. I noticed that my son’s three month old chicken was lethargic yesterday. Today I held it and there is an enormous air pocket in its neck. Can anyone please advise? Thank you!
Let’s start with a few questions.
What are they eating?
I read the discussion about grit. Yes. It is important. It helps the chicks gizzard grow and get strong. Grit comes in sizes for chicks and adults.
Grit helps their digestion by getting caught up in the folds of the gizzard, a muscular organ and acts as grinding stones as food, especial fibrous food, passes through.
Unlike humans, when a chicken sleeps the digestive system is hard at work. If you look under the roost of a flock of chickens in the morning, the evidence of this process is right beneath them. When they wake up their crop should be empty and flat. You can check this by gently running your hand from the base of their neck right down the front of their chest.
As they run around eating, drinking and scratching at the ground all day, everything that goes in is deposited into the crop. It’s like a holding tank for food to be divested later.
It is expandable like a balloon and can get quite large. Sometimes you can even see it through parted feathers on the chickens RIGHT front chest.
On hot days if they’ve eaten less and drank a lot, or had a lot of fruit such as watermelon, their crop can look extra big and feel very smooshy, even hang down lower than usual.
If your chicken has a lot of water in their crop and you squeeze it they are going to regurgitate whether they’re sick or not.
Is like heimlich for chickens!
And it poses a risk of aspiration.
To monitor a chicken’s crop you need 12 hrs.
You need to feel it at night once they’ve gone to bed. Take away their food and water.
Cup your hand around it and make a mental note of its size, shape, location and destiny. THEN.... in the morning (here’s the important part), BEFORE you feed them OR let them out of the coop, feel for the crop again.
Is it flat? Or is it still the same or nearly the same as the night before?
If it is flat, DO NOT TREAT FOR SOUR CROP.
On the part about the bloody poop I support the decision to treat with corid ASAP. And if the chick doesn’t want to drink I’d go here this post for the severity dosage.
Corid dosing and severity.
You can give a drop directly to the beak.