Cross Beak baby

[MeggoEggo]

I recently took on an 8 week old chicken with cross beak. I’m wondering if this is a mild case or a severe case. I make her mush, and she seems to eat that easier than the crumble. Anyone experience cross beak and have tips for me? She is SO sweet and loves our other 8 week old babies.

 

[ladybrasa]

I don’t have any direct experience, but from reading, that’s not the worst. However, as I understand, it may become worse as she grows.

 

[sourland]

Generally such birds can survive if fed moistened feed in a deep dish. To me her cross beak is moderate/severe. I would trim the beak back to just short of the quick to facilitate eating.

 

[Docdetective]

Hello! I am a fellow cross break rescuer.
This one looks pretty bad to me. I feed mine crumbles mixed with water and mix it so it makes a very wet mash. I would experiment on how much water you mix in, mine only eats if it is very watery. Also put it in a deep bowl, and make sure if you make a large batch it is changed out regularly.

 

[Chicken Minion]

I have a young cross-beak that's a little worse than the pics shown here. It does seem to be getting worse as he gets older. He's almost 4 months now. When it first started getting bad, he could still pick up food as long as the pieces were big enough. I tried repeatedly to get him to eat wet food but with no success. Maybe I'm using the wrong kind of food because it doesn't really clump. It's either too soupy or too crumbly for him to get to his throat.

Then overnight he stopped being able to pick up food so I started hand-feeding him every bite, and that went okay. Then suddenly his jaw locked up and he couldn't open it enough to even push a raisin in.

I took him to the vet to see if there's anything that can be done. Just some info on what I learned:
She said as they grow, their mandibles become more mis-aligned,sometimes to the point where the jaw joints don't meet anymore and it can result in (I can't remember the exact term) basically the chicken equivalent of pretty severe TMJ and the resulting "lock-jaw".

She also said that his beak is so severely misaligned that the only thing that can really be done is a surgery she'd only read about but never performed. Basically they remove the entire lower beak/mandible and then reattach it with metal wires. It won't be perfectly aligned but should be a huge improvement and enough to allow him to eat on his own.

His upper beak is also extremely curved (which seems to be the case in many cross-beaks), and that seems to be what gets in the way more than anything else. She said there's a procedure where they basically cut off a portion of the beak (cutting off some of the live cells) and then cauterize the end of it, which should result in the beak not continuing to grow.

She also mentioned that this surgery is very complicated and expensive, and would require several weeks of tube feeding afterward, while they recover. For me... that's not something I want to put him through (or my bank account) so I brought him home and just had to get creative. I'm not even going to tell you how I get him to eat because his diet is not good and I'm concerned about the long-term effects. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody but for now, until we can figure out how to handle this, I'm just focused on getting some chicken food into him, but it can't continue like this forever. I spoke with my vet again about it and his current diet and she's going to do some more research to find out if there's anything else can be done.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know what I've learned about it. This is the first cross-beak I've ever had, and one of the sweetest and most affectionate chickens I've ever had, so I'm going to keep experimenting and hope I can come up with something that works for him and keeps him healthy. I'll update here if my vet is able to come up with any good solutions.

 

[ThinMintTheChicken]

As you can see in my profile picture, i do own a crossbeak chicken (her name is Thin Mint). I would recommend giving her cooked oatmeal and maybe some raw egg for protein. Thin Mint LOVES oatmeal and has barely any trouble eating it.