- Jun 8, 2013
- 10
- 0
- 22
So, I never thought that I would have chickens!!!! But, one day walking thru a local feed store picking up food for our 3 wonderful little dogs there they were. I was instantly in love with the little balls of fluff. I called my other half and asked if we could start a new adventure. He was all about it. So, 2 days later we bought our 1st 6 little fluffy's. We decided on 2 white leghorns, 2 red sex links and 2 black astrolorpe's. The reds and whites were guaranteed to be girlies but the blacks were a gamble. We ended up with one rooster that we just planned on giving to a friend if we got. (but he is beautiful and too funny, think we might keep him). Anyway early on in our adventure our chicks only 4 days old. One of our reds that we named RED started acting funny. In just four days I had become so attached I was determined to do whatever we needed to do to make her ok. We started to ask around to our friends and aquaintances that had raised chickens before if they and ever heard of a chick flipping over backwards. They all said no and that we should seperate her right away from the others. We didn't listen. Instead we watched her closely and she didn't seem to get any worse and none of the others seemed to be affected. One of our friends told us to try giving her some vitamins because maybe she wasn't getting enough nutrition. So, we started to give her vitamin B complex in her water. It seemed like it helped but not enough to really make a difference. So, I started looking for answers. When I typed in dizzy chicken to the google search bar BYC is the 1st site that came up. I looked and there were lots of posts about issues. I read thru them all!!!!!! Looked like we were doing the right thing. She didn't really seem to be affected by these dizzy spells other than she really couldn't control them. Several weeks later when they were big enough to start going outside for a bit we noticed with more space to move around she was actually not just getting dizzy but she was actually going in circles and then flipping over. At this point she was damaging her tail and wings in her fits. We called the vet and he really didn't have any thing to say to help us. So, again I consulted BYC to see if I had missed something. Doing that research I thought that I had determined she had wry neck syndrome although her breed was not prone to that I was clinging to anything to helping her. She was so sweet and would be so scared after one of her episodes. She seemed to be getting them more and more. I found a potential way to fix her and so we tried it out minus one item. After one week we consulted the vet again as we realized that she was almost going stiff when she got excited or startled and was unable to control the flap of her wings or the way her legs went stiff which caused the flip over. He told us that she might just have seizures, that all things can have seizures and she would either grow out of it of she wouldn't. Anyway, we stopped giving her the wry neck treatment after about 2 weeks as it didn't really seem like it was helping her. We decided to just see if she would just grow out of it. Because of her condition her wings and tail were not as big as her siblings. So, she was unable to make the jump to the coop door. She would stand under the door looking up and walking in circles chirping like she knew she wanted to be up there. So for several days we would put her in and then we decided she needed a ramp. But because of the seizures she had no balance and the ramp was too steep. We built a special ramp that wrapped around the edge of the run and up to the coop. RED is happy and healthy and loves her ramp. All her siblings are use to her and really pay no attention when she has an episode. She is 11 weeks and at this point seems to be growing out of the episodes. ( I am so happy we gave her a chance!!!!!) She went from having the episodes about every 10 minutes at 3-4 weeks to about 1 or 2 a day. I am hoping they will stop all together. She is also growing her tail feathers and wings out. Anyway thank you for all the information on this site and thanks for letting he join and share our amazing journey. We are excited for the time with our chickens to come.
