Arizona Chickens

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Gallo's info is exactly the reason I caulked every stinkin' place I could find. They are soooo gross!

Seems Tucson has it bad, but when I re-do the coop I think I'll go ahead and caulk. I mean, ick. If DH knew about this he'd ban all my chookies instantly.
 
pimachickens, Poultry Ticks!
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How did you find them or even think to look for them? I remember how mad I was too! I don't normally like to kill things, but I derived great satisfaction from jabbing that nail file into the cracks. It just made me madder when the blood oozed from the cracks, dripping as if the coop were bleeding, but knowing that it came from my poor girls. They are such insidious creatures with their vampirish habits and about as hard to kill too. They have become resistant to most of the pesticides I have listed on the page. One thing that I don't think I have on my page is how important I think DE is to helping control them here in the desert. Poultry ticks are so successful because they can flatten themselves out in cracks and limit desiccation. They can live for years without feeding. When chickens are present, they will crawl out of their cracks and crevices and feed. Once they feed, they drop off the chickens to the ground (or more rarely the roost) and find their way back to their sleeping/congregating areas. If you have DE on the ground, they will get it on them. I've seen them crawl out of their cracks covered with DE. DE adsorbs the outer lipid layer in the exoskeleton and makes it difficult or impossible to maintain water balance. This only works at humidity levels lower than 70%, so may be less effective during monsoon season. So, when I do my major quarterly coop clean out (where I remove and spray down the entire interior of the coop), I put DE on the floor to mix with the dirt and also in the pine shavings in nest boxes and the elevated part. Of course it's doesn't work very fast, but over time it will help. I think the larvae are especially vulnerable before and after their first feeding. You have to be very vigilant now. After the initial extermination, I had ticks showing up months later. I don't know if it was from a new immigration to the coop or if they came from the original population and it took that long to make it back into the coop. I suspect the latter. Good luck today!
 
I just went back and read my poultry tick page for the first time since I wrote it during my initial infestation. I removed the sentence about my skepticism of DE. What I didn't include in the page were observations I made on captive ticks in the months after discovering them. Yep, I collected a bunch up and experimented on them with various things. DE wasn't very effective at all in the short run, but within a month of being coated, it had a devastating impact on them. I have a lot more info to include on the page; someday I'll get it updated.
 
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REALLY glad to know about the DE. I'll step up my use, and maybe change to sand instead of shavings? What do you think?

I have mixed feelings about the sand. My DW loves it, but she doesn't clean the coop. Originally, the coop had our hard-pack dirt as a floor and it was very easy to rake up the droppings into a dustpan and carry out (which I did every other day). Now we have sand on the floor and I have to sift the droppings from it and I'm not too happy about that. I think the chickens like it though, so it stays. If you don't clean that often it's a pretty good cover on the ground to keep things dry and soft for chicken feet. It also might be better if you have more chickens than I do. I use shavings in the elevated part of my coop and I'm very pleased with that. I probably wouldn't ever use shavings on the ground, just because of the messiness they would cause with my coop situation. I used to be very skeptical about the effectiveness of DE and I still am about certain uses (e.g. using it internally as a wormer), but I've come to realize that it's very effective at controlling many creepy crawlies here in our low humidity environment.
 
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Speaking of this, supposedly Beavis and Butthead are returning for a new season in October? Instead of music videos, it looks like they make fun of Jersey Shore, etc
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Crazy! I hope they don't ruin it!
 

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