Please help! I have a flock of over 90 turkeys and chickens (1 guinea cock and some recent ducklings too) who are all loosing massive amounts of weight in only about a week. Virtually every bird I have is extremely skinny, even my Cornish Cross. But these birds are still eating insane amounts of food. I put out about 10 pounds of feed a day (over half the flock are only 5-6 week Olds so they don't eat much) and I've watched them eat it happily, but at the end of the day there's still food on the ground and in the buckets and my birds are continuing to lose weight. Since yesterday they've hardly drank anything, too.
This is obviously either something infectious or something in the environment, so I started going over recent changes that course have caused this. I'm pretty much constantly bringing in birds, but almost exclusively from this local guy who's always sold me good birds, and I've never had a problem with his before in over a year of buying there, plus I the only birds that don't have an issue yet are the Leghorns I just bought from him. The other options are two roosters I recently brought in from outside flocks, one of which I'm not concerned about, the other I find to be my most likely cause. The first is a Silkie rooster, about four months old, but he was in perfect condition besides one runny eye. The second, though, was a half-stray Barred Rock that was living behind the local body shop- now, on one hand the people said that they were feeding him through the fence, and I thought it was likely just that he was inserted, but when I brought him in he was super skinny. That was about 3-5 weeks ago. And the only environmental change I've had recently is putting them on Denagard for a mycoplasma issue (also thanks to the Barred Rock, definitely not picking up any stray chickens anymore... Learned my lesson this time!) but I don't think that side effects fro that could cause such a massive effect, could they?
Anyways, I'm badly in need of answers. Has anyone had or heard of anything like this before? I know it's a little similar to tapeworm, but I think it takes longer than one week for the tapeworms to have this bad an effect, and they're probably have to have been there for a while- but when we last went to the local bird vet she checked and found no worms in my flock. I also should say I do have Mareks, but even my vaccinated birds are being affected and besides I think the minimum incubation period is 6 weeks, and like I mentioned before, most of my flock is 5 weeks or younger, and they are affected too.
*I do apologize for any confusing bits or errors, I'm writing this on a crappy tablet that has been dropped too many times
This is obviously either something infectious or something in the environment, so I started going over recent changes that course have caused this. I'm pretty much constantly bringing in birds, but almost exclusively from this local guy who's always sold me good birds, and I've never had a problem with his before in over a year of buying there, plus I the only birds that don't have an issue yet are the Leghorns I just bought from him. The other options are two roosters I recently brought in from outside flocks, one of which I'm not concerned about, the other I find to be my most likely cause. The first is a Silkie rooster, about four months old, but he was in perfect condition besides one runny eye. The second, though, was a half-stray Barred Rock that was living behind the local body shop- now, on one hand the people said that they were feeding him through the fence, and I thought it was likely just that he was inserted, but when I brought him in he was super skinny. That was about 3-5 weeks ago. And the only environmental change I've had recently is putting them on Denagard for a mycoplasma issue (also thanks to the Barred Rock, definitely not picking up any stray chickens anymore... Learned my lesson this time!) but I don't think that side effects fro that could cause such a massive effect, could they?
Anyways, I'm badly in need of answers. Has anyone had or heard of anything like this before? I know it's a little similar to tapeworm, but I think it takes longer than one week for the tapeworms to have this bad an effect, and they're probably have to have been there for a while- but when we last went to the local bird vet she checked and found no worms in my flock. I also should say I do have Mareks, but even my vaccinated birds are being affected and besides I think the minimum incubation period is 6 weeks, and like I mentioned before, most of my flock is 5 weeks or younger, and they are affected too.
*I do apologize for any confusing bits or errors, I'm writing this on a crappy tablet that has been dropped too many times
