Babies just arrived from hatchery.... diarrhea????/ 1 gasping for air

[vetgirl00us]

Hi, I'm new and I just received my babies from the post office this morning at 9:30. I've had them in the brooder for a few hours and I have one that arrived gasping for breath, disinterested in food or drink and falling over. The rest look good. They began eating a drinking immediately but now they are squirting out watery greenish or clearish diarrhea. What's the deal with this? Brooder temp under the lamp is 100-102 deg and the water I gave was 100 deg with a bit of sugar in it like the article said to do. I sprinkled the chick starter on the floor and they are eating it, grooming themselves and drinking and sleeping. Anything I can do for the sick one or the diarrhea? They are silver sebrights and the sick one is a white faced black spanish bantam.

thanks guys,
Mandy

 

[Illia]

There's often a chick who's pretty weak or dead in chick shipments, I would try and dunk its beak in water to let it have some. Also, do you have anything you can dissolve in the water with nutrients that the chick can have? Likely problems like this are just caused by shipment stress.

 

[Dora'smom]

You can try dripping some poly-vi-sol without iron, along it's beak, so that it might drink it in. That would just give it a nutritional boost.

 

[MelissaR]

I think your temperatures are too high. The brooder should be at 95 degrees for the first week and then stepped down 5 degrees each week after. If they're eating and drinking fine, they shouldn't need any sugar in the water. I've heard that too much sugar water can cause diarrhea?

I'm hoping someone will join in with advise on the gasping chick. Try to get it to drink a couple of drops of plain, room temperature water. The best way to do this is to hold the chick and put a drop of water on the side of the beak. That way it kind-of trickles in to their mouth and doesn't get aspirated.

Good Luck!

 

[vetgirl00us]

Thanks, I will take up the sugar water. That was just what the hatchery had advised to do.