Ever have a mystery death? Can it be a normal thing for one to drop dead once in awhile?

[blueberrychickens]

same thing happened here today. I went out to feed the girls & one of the soon to be 2 yr olds was dead on the floor. No signs of trauma or illness. I'm completely baffled as to what happened. I hope its not something contaigous to the other hens in the coop.

 

[Mrs. K]

when it is sudden like that, no sign of sickness, so sign of distress, it is generally not contagious.

 

[A.T. Hagan]

Unless it was a predator kill or something obvious such as internal laying most of my bird deaths are mysteries. By that I mean that I almost never have two birds die in a flock within a month of each other and most of the time there is nothing that I notice outwardly about them. I just find them dead on the ground. Out of four layer tractors, a static hen yard, and a rooster pen I lose maybe a bird every two to three months for reasons that I cannot readily discern. "Natural causes" is what a coroner will usually put down for people who expire for no apparent reason and that's what I attribute to my mystery bird losses.

If I had several closer together in time, especially if they were in the same flock, I'd definitely go looking for a reason and I'd start with the feed as centrarchid suggests along with any outward symptoms they may be showing.

 

[speckledhen]

More often than not, in the absence of obvious illness or trauma, a loss such as the one described is the result of a heart attack. It happens: we've all got to go sometime-even chickens.

I agree with Bill. This is especially true of roosters, seems to me. They seem to live a more high-stress, on-alert life, which surely takes its toll. Only two or three times did one die suddenly that I wasn't sure what killed it, but it does happen. Just recently, my crippled rooster died of an apparent heart attack. He had a very low-stress life, good feed, never had worms or lice/mites, was crowing 15 minutes before, seemed perfectly fine at 4 1/2 years old and was just gone when I went to check on him. Guess it was his time.

With hens, it's most often something reproductive that you can't see from the outside and it seems sudden to you when it's been coming on for awhile.

 

[Erin~TheChickenLover]

I have had one mystery death this year. It was one of my rhode island reds named Tweety. Tweety was a perfectly healthy beautiful bird at her prime. She died in her sleep one week before what would have been her 1st birthday. There were no signs of trauma, just nothing at all. I think that with 120 birds it's definitely possible that the rooster you found dead was of a mystery death.