Hi everyone. I have a flock of 2 old rumpless araucana roos and 33 hens (but this number unfortunately gets lower time to time).
Last fall I lost 15 pullets in 3 months, and the lab confirmed that we have mareks disease, 2 types, the nervous and the tumour version.
After a lot of reading and discussion I decided not to eliminate the rest of my flock, but to only hatch and vaccinate from now on. Deaths finally stopped in December, the flock layers were doing fine work, and didn't have an issue until end of February, when my beautiful 1 yo black copper marans roo, Bastian was found in one of the nesting boxes, hiding, having something like an episode, really wide pupils, and totally unbalanced, with a probable sign of vomiting. Even with separating him immediately and trying to give hime vitamine B, unfortunately we lost him in a couple of hours. He might have been a bit less active in January but it was really cold (-14C° at nights) and he seemed like molting, so I thought it's just that.
Since that I had 2 deaths in March, one leghorn with typical Marek's, and the other a blue italian just yesterday, which is much more like Bastians. She did not have any previous symptoms, way laying last week, and was found in the same nesting box as Bastian, just breathing heavily, and had a little purple on the end of her comb. Bastian did not have purple comb until his death, and it wasn't as bad as I saw a lot elsewhere.
My question is - can this be another type of death due to Marek's, or is it something else?
Another info is that we're trying to deal with rats for 6 months now, with not much success, but we do not use poison at all, because of our chickens. But we live in a small city and there are plenty of other houses, so we don't know if the rats might be poisoned or not.
Thanks for your help in advance.
Last fall I lost 15 pullets in 3 months, and the lab confirmed that we have mareks disease, 2 types, the nervous and the tumour version.
After a lot of reading and discussion I decided not to eliminate the rest of my flock, but to only hatch and vaccinate from now on. Deaths finally stopped in December, the flock layers were doing fine work, and didn't have an issue until end of February, when my beautiful 1 yo black copper marans roo, Bastian was found in one of the nesting boxes, hiding, having something like an episode, really wide pupils, and totally unbalanced, with a probable sign of vomiting. Even with separating him immediately and trying to give hime vitamine B, unfortunately we lost him in a couple of hours. He might have been a bit less active in January but it was really cold (-14C° at nights) and he seemed like molting, so I thought it's just that.
Since that I had 2 deaths in March, one leghorn with typical Marek's, and the other a blue italian just yesterday, which is much more like Bastians. She did not have any previous symptoms, way laying last week, and was found in the same nesting box as Bastian, just breathing heavily, and had a little purple on the end of her comb. Bastian did not have purple comb until his death, and it wasn't as bad as I saw a lot elsewhere.
My question is - can this be another type of death due to Marek's, or is it something else?
Another info is that we're trying to deal with rats for 6 months now, with not much success, but we do not use poison at all, because of our chickens. But we live in a small city and there are plenty of other houses, so we don't know if the rats might be poisoned or not.
Thanks for your help in advance.
