Just an FYI in case you need to deal with this again. You can put antibiotics ointment directly onto the eye to treat an injury. I had two roosters Duke it out today. When I found the looser he looked like Rocky at the end of the movie. One eye swollen and watering. Cuts and scrapes all over his face. I brought him up to the house and I held while DH greased up his eye and face for him. Use a q tip to gently smear bacitracin over the closed eye. Body heat will liquify the ointment so that it runs into the injured eye.
No avian vet here so creative flock management is the general rule for my flock.
I kept having the urge to cry Adrian! Every time I looked at my injured bird.
Just an FYI in case you need to deal with this again. You can put antibiotics ointment directly onto the eye to treat an injury. I had two roosters Duke it out today. When I found the looser he looked like Rocky at the end of the movie. One eye swollen and watering. Cuts and scrapes all over his face. I brought him up to the house and I held while DH greased up his eye and face for him. Use a q tip to gently smear bacitracin over the closed eye. Body heat will liquify the ointment so that it runs into the injured eye.
No avian vet here so creative flock management is the general rule for my flock.
I kept having the urge to cry Adrian! Every time I looked at my injured bird.
Nice job! You've made a remarkable difference in this duck's life.
After hearing about the use of Bacitracin ointment, I just want to share this with the group: Neosporin ointment is a mixture of antibiotics, including bacitracin, polymixin, and more (I can't remember). Seems like you get more bang for the buck.
Ok weird thing...
He's been doing great, and all but one of his scabs have fallen off. He is back to acting like his old happy chipper self again. Yay!
Now for the weird part. The last couple of mornings he has come out of the duck house with more and more feathers missing from around his eyes. At first I thought it was my one girl pulling them out at night, but when I took a closer look today, I found that they are actually falling out. Just petting him in those spots with very little pressure caused them to fall out like when he was moulting his baby feathers. It wasn't happening anywhere else that I checked, just around the eyes. This is my first year owning ducks, so I don't know if this is normal/common, but it seems very strange to me.
Neomycin is the third antibiotic. We called it Triple A when I was working and yes, if that is what you have on hand it works also.
The feather loss is odd. I'm wondering if it could be from heat that the injuries were producing around the wounds? Or stress? Did you use any ointment around his eyes? Could he be having an allergic reaction to it if you did?
Aside from the very first cleaning, all I've used was twice daily treatments of Vetericyn bovine eye wash and Neosporin w/out pain relief. I also started adding a poultry vitamin supplement to their drinking water. I stopped the Neosporin a few days ago since everything was scabbed over nicely. I have still been using the eye wash, but reduced it to once a day. The skin looks clean, no sign of mites, rash or fungus from what I can tell. He's been putting weight back on(he had lost some when he and our other drake had started fighting). Our 5 ducks share 2 kiddie pools and the water in them is replaced every other day, so he has plenty of water to dunk his head in. He's back to preening regularly. Could the stress he had during the healing time cause the feather loss? Do ducks ever experience a really strange moult with temporary bald patches? This is so weird! He seems to be a happy boy right now, so I'm not that worried. I just hope he gets his feathers back in before it starts to get cold.
I think the feather loss is just from the injured tissue and it will grow back...It might grow back in before the weather gets cold...Glad to here he is doing fantastic....