Maybe it is just because I don’t really notice or try to intervene until the poor thing is almost gone but it seems like as soon as I take a sick bird in the house and try to at least make it comfortable until it passes the poor baby dies. It seems to happen to me a lot. I most recently found two listless babies, one about 5 months old and one about 2 months old just standing alone. The older on was fluffed up so obviously didn’t feel well and I had noticed it standing like that for a couple of days. It happened to be a cross beak so I trimmed its upper beak just a bit so perhaps it could get food a little easier. She died the next day right after I decided she might be cold and need to come into the house to warm up. The younger one I found crying outside the coop when I went to lock up the flock. I had noticed it moving a little slowly for a couple of days so I brought him in the house and did my best to provide a warm place for him to sleep. This morning he was gone. I just seems like I might me hastening their demise by trying to help them to be more comfortable. Am I upsetting them do you think but sequestering them from the flock? I feel better knowing that at least they were warm for the last hours of their life but darn it I hate thinking I may have shocked them to death by my heart-felt interventions. Any others out there experience this phenomenon? I have long since learned that I’m probably not going to save them so I don’t do any heroics with meds and such. I did try to get some "Save-A-Chick" liquid in the baby but that is it besides offering them both food, which they refused. Ill be curious to hear any ideas on this. Please share so we all may learn. Thank you, Robin
It sounds like you are describing the last stages of coccidia. Has it occurred to you that trying to help them when you first notice them acting sick might be a better plan?
Sorry about your chicks. I think it is that prey animal instinct of "I either have to hide or I have to act normal and not sick until the last possible moment so the predator does not single me out to eat." Most animals are pretty good at hiding when they are sick because sick animals are easy targets. I don't think that bringing them in the house when we notice they are sick, or our treatment is usually what kills them (sometimes it maybe if we do the wrong thing or something really drastic) but sometimes they are just so far gone by the time we notice the signs there is not enough time to turn them around. Theoretically the better you are at "seeing" something off about the birds the less this should happen. Of course some things move so fast you really couldn't see there is a problem enough ahead of time, or there is nothing that can really be done.
