Thank you for sharing. Your George sure is a handsome fellow and the girls look happy. I do hope that the surgery is a success, please keep us updated. When I have crop issues I remove all grains and alternate small feeds of sardines in olive oil and pellets soaked in warm water ( to make a mash ), with a little oil. You can in fact give small quantities of aspirin to help with her discomfort . I also give arnica drops directly into the beak.Sure, happy to shareMy girl is a Buff Orpington, approximately 13 to 14 months old. She is currently in moult, and has not laid an egg for about 6 or 7 weeks. I noticed that she was a little lethargic last Tuesday. She would stand in the run (never sit, just stand) and stare off into space. Even when I arrived with the treat bucket she just stood there. She is my head hen, and the rooster's best girl, and when she didn't come running for food when either he or I called her, I knew something was up. I sat a spell in the run with the flock to observe her behaviour and that's when I noticed the size of her crop. Granted, it was the end of the day, but I knew she hadn't just eaten and I thought she looked quite distended. I herded her into the coop, caught her to have a good feel of her crop, and after prising the rooster off my leg (!) I found that her crop was about the size of a tennis ball and very, very hard. I immediately isolated her (much to the rooster's displeasure) and took her to the vet on the Tuesday morning. Our vet agreed that her crop was impacted and offered to do surgery on her, but made the point that whilst he had seen it done, he had never done it himself. He gave me some liquid parrafin to give her, which I applied to some corn kernels and she gobbled them straight up! I had been nervous about putting it directly into her mouth, you see. The next morning she had passed all the corn whilst roosting but she was still clearly impacted and exhibiting signs of pain. Surgery was scheduled for Friday to ensure the vet had time to read up on the procedure and I duly dropped her off at 8.30am. The surgery (which cost $280) went well and the office staff made a big fuss about how lovely she was. They don't generally treat chickens and they thought she was delightful! Even the vet said to me "Look, if you rub her back here she will bockle at you!" and sure enough she did. She got an A+ for popularity! They found some semi-digested grasses, grain, sand and vegetable matter in her crop (which he showed me) but not a big ball of twine-like hay as we had suspected. He said it looked like crop stasis, which can be caused by bacterial infections, yeast issues and Marek's, which is still a possibility. He said that should she pass away in the future, we should do a necropsy to confirm if it is or isn't Mareks, so that we know what we are dealing with going forward. That made me a little sad. She was sent home with a pain-killer and antibiotics, to take twice a day. I have adopted the salad-dressing approach to these as well, and whist I have successfully given her the painkiller, the antibiotic must taste like crap, because I've only gotten one dose a day into her, and not the two that she was prescribed. Oh well, better than nothing! I find I have better luck with tuna flavoured cat food! That's just between you and I though, ok?! She seems ok - she does get pain still as it was a fairly big operation, and she wakes me up in the morning making a 'crying' sound, so I dose her straight away then. She sits and rests a bit, but also has a scratch about in the mornings and evenings. Mind you, we have had 3 days over 40 degrees here so she is probably heat affected too. She will not roost yet - probably too painful on her crop. She sleeps in a portable nest box on cooler nights, or crouched in the corner of the coop behind her waterer on hot nights. She eats, but prefers vegetable matter like cucumber and cabbage, rather than her pellets. I am ok with this as long as she is happy, although I do have a bowl of pellets in there for her. She has a friend in the pen next door so she has company, and she complains loudly to her during the day. She is, after all, an Orpington! Some things never change
She is the one in the red apron. Her sister wears the blue one, and George is her other half - keeping watch! - Krista
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lost a couple of pullets in today's heat, thought I have done everything right as well, the roofs ventilated the outside coop area has shade cloth, I put ice in there water I poured water over the roof and shade cloth, what else can I do? I've just gone a bought a sprinkler to put on the roof but I can't be home all day to check on them, any ideas? I tried leaving a water tray in there for them to walk in but didn't really seem the use it
