Help!! my barred rock is super sick!!!

[pwand]

Thank you for the info everyone!! I do check crops on occassion, but will certainly start doing this more regularly. Fortunately, organic feed flies off the shelves here, so I'm not concerned with its shelf life. We have to usually special order it when it comes in, or we will miss out. Alas, there is always the possibility of a bad batch, or something they ate. We usually give them our fresh scraps, but who knows.. 

I'm going to read up on all of this for sure. Any other info would be much appreciated.. especially if any of you think we should be regularly doing any other supplements. I do have some dewormer here that a friend gave me last year when she moved. Piperazine?? I'll look into the link above though... 

Piperazine only treats round worm. You need the other stuff.

You can put apple cider with mother in it into the water. Some people do it daily, some don't. I give my birds garlic. Keep it simple. We can go over board sometimes. I put vitamins in their water once in awhile as well. Your doing all the right things for birds.

 

[casportpony]

So sorry you lost her.

You should know that she was very sick and would not have lived even if you had taken her to the vet. Slow, labored breathing almost always means the dying process has started. Now is probably a good time to get the rest of your flock on a worming program with a wormer like Safeguard (fenbendazole) or Valbazen (albendazole).

I'd also suggest getting a baseline weight on the birds you care the most about (for me it's my peafowl, turkeys and a few chickens). That way if one looks a little off you can re-weigh it and you'll know if something is going on. Weight loss is almost always the first symptom you'll see in a sick bird and it's too hard to judge this by just feeling them. I use a digital kitchen scale and weigh in grams because it's easier for me to calculate dose of medicine.

-Kathy