Dead Buff Orpington

[JackHammer]

I'm looking for ideas of why our Buff died. I don't have many clues but this is what I know. We have six chickens. They have a good coop, excellent feed and no chance of predators (the run is completely enclosed in hardware cloth and there is plenty of room). I collect the eggs, check feed and water and offer scratch and sometimes weeds / worms from the yard nightly. All looked fine till last yesterday. One Buff was staying very still with its tail feathers pointed down. She allowed herself to be picked up when she usually would not. We checked for a bound egg and applied lubrication but there was no evidence of an egg. No sign of mites or lice. I fed her part of a very small piece of tums for calcium. Her comb looked pale. She would have been two years old in a couple of weeks. This morning she was dead in the run. Had she been alive I would have brought her in and done what I could / found out if she was still laying or pooping. After death I looked closer for bugs and found none. Felt the crop and didn't feel anything out of the ordinary although rigor had already set in. No signs of injury, no weepy eyes or nose. I guess maybe it was just her time but she was awfully young.

 

[sourland]

Sometimes they just die. It does not appear if it was an infectious entity, so you don't need to worry about that. Sorry for your loss.

 

[ButtonquailGirl14]

so sorry.

 

[Eggcessive]

A necropsy is the best way to look for a cause of death. If you refrigerate the body, you can contact your state vet or poultry lab to perform one, or many people opt to open the body to look for themselves. At 2 she may have suffered from one of many reproductive disorders, such as internal laying, egg yolk peritonitis, and others. Crop problems are common as well. Sorry for your loss.

 

[rebrascora]

I agree. We can only speculate. A necropsy will give you an answer. One of the things that can cause death like this is Fatty Liver Haemorrhagic Syndrome and larger birds like Orps seem to be more prone to it, but it can also be linked to a diet too high in carbohydrates.... I note that you feed scratch grains on a daily basis but some organic whole grain proprietary feeds can also lead to this problem because the birds can selectively eat particular components of the feed and leave others and the high carb grains tend to be favoured over the pulses and lentils which provide more protein, leading to a dietary imbalance even though the feed itself is nutritionally balanced. With a pellet or crumble this cannot happen because the feed is homogenous and the chicken has no option but to eat a balanced ration, but if you feed too much scratch, that can then knock the diet, particularly if your layer feed is just 16% protein. Larger birds often do better on a higher protein feed, particularly if you are going to continue to give scratch.
The above is just one possible cause, but it is usually quite an easy one to detect if you do a necropsy yourself (there will be thick yellow fatty deposits in the abdomen and around the organs and the liver will be slightly discoloured and mushy and there may be fluid in the abdominal cavity if it has ruptured) and could give you information that may benefit the rest of your flock.... ie a dietary change to prevent other birds suffering similar deaths or illness.

 

[JackHammer]

Thanks for the kind words and suggestions. Too late for an autopsy. I buried her right away. If this happens again I will send the body off to get looked at or do it myself. When I was young we had a hundred without names. 50 years later we have six and they all have names.