Help!! My fav roo is dead!

[junebuggena]

DE will not treat an active outbreak of lice. And chickens kept inside the coop for days at a time is the prime environment for a lice outbreak.

 

[microchick]

Agreed. Ditch the DE and get a bag of 7 garden dust and a knee high hose sock.Fill the sock with 7 and use it like a powder puff on all of your birds making sure to apply liberally around their vents and under their wings. You can also use Ivermectin pour on for cattle. I pour some into a Squeeze bottle and apply 1-2 drops between the wings on the skin of my small bantams and 3 drops on standard layers. Standard roosters get 4 drops and repeat on everyone in 10 days. Some people use a hypodermic syringe with the needle off but I prefer a Squeeze bottle with a long nozzle on it.

You still need to clean and debug your coop and nesting boxes.

Yep, creepy crawlies can literally bleed a bird dry of blood. An anemic bird is a hypothermic bird making it more susceptible to cold.

 

[BantyChooks]

Agreed. Ditch the DE and get a bag of 7 garden dust and a knee high hose sock.Fill the sock with 7 and use it like a powder puff on all of your birds making sure to apply liberally around their vents and under their wings. You can also use Ivermectin pour on for cattle. I pour some into a Squeeze bottle and apply 1-2 drops between the wings on the skin of my small bantams and 3 drops on standard layers. Standard roosters get 4 drops and repeat on everyone in 10 days. Some people use a hypodermic syringe with the needle off but I prefer a Squeeze bottle with a long nozzle on it.

You still need to clean and debug your coop and nesting boxes.

Yep, creepy crawlies can literally bleed a bird dry of blood. An anemic bird is a hypothermic bird making it more susceptible to cold.

Permethrin spray works well too and isn't quite so 'poofy'. Downside is if you use it in winter you get chickensicles.

 

[bobbi-j]

Permethrin spray works well too and isn't quite so 'poofy'. Downside is if you use it in winter you get chickensicles.

Isn't there also a permethrin powder?

 

[BantyChooks]

Isn't there also a permethrin powder?

Yep. I've used both.

 

[Jkmsell06]

He was his normal red color and didn't seem to look pale at all....if he was being (sorry in advance for the lack of better words....) "sucked dry"....he certainly had no signs or symptoms of being so....

 

[Sunshine Flock]

I'm so sorry to hear about your dear rooster. That would be very upsetting indeed. When something of any kind dies, it always dies for a reason. But with chickens I guess we don't always get to know what causes them to suddenly pass.

Lice is so small to see. Would you mind describing how you found it? I've never seen it on chickens and am wondering if they're easy to see. Thank you.

 

[BantyChooks]

Lice is so small to see. Would you mind describing how you found it? I've never seen it on chickens and am wondering if they're easy to see. Thank you.

I'm not the OP, but I figured I'd chime in since I have had way more experience with lice than I ever wanted to have. A well established and full grown louse infestation is really easy to see. If you look at the skin or feather shafts on the back of the neck, under the wing, or in the fluff you will see multiple straw coloured insects of several mm long that crawl everywhere. Sometimes you will get lice on yourself if the bird is squirmy. They do crawl out of the way fairly quickly, so you have to look as soon as you separate the feathers. As for eggs, I have found they're not easy to see or find unless you have a REALLY bad infestation and I sure hope you find it before then. The only time I have seen them was when I had one single bird that had an extreme overload. The rest of my flock was just fine, but for some reason he came down with them worse. I felt bad when I finally noticed.

Flaky or powdery looking skin is another pretty reliable symptom. A young colony of lice will be a bit harder to spot. Just look for near microscopic crawly things in the aforementioned places and make sure the light is good.

As a side note, the reason I mentioned all those places is I have found (depending on the flock/source of infestation) that they'll congregate mostly in one place. With my most recent issue, it was on the neck. Before, it was under the wings. On other flocks they were mostly in the rear area. I am unsure what would cause this difference, but I have definitely seen it.

 

[rebrascora]

I think it is important to understand which pest/parasite you are talking about. The description above by @BantyChooks is lice. Lice live on the skin and feather shaft debris. They do not suck blood and will not kill a chicken but are very irritating to them. Often you will find a heavy infestation on a chicken that is already ill and not dust bathing regularly or birds that have been confined to an area where they have no dust bathing facilities.... winter time when the ground is muddy or frozen solid etc.
Red mites live in the cracks and crevices of the coop and crawl onto the chickens at night when they are roosting to suck their blood. I've had a couple of pretty bad infestations of these and whilst combs started to go pale, I've never had a chicken behave poorly and certainly not die from them, but they can pass viruses and infection from one chicken to another. Again I think they could perhaps take an already sick chicken down but you would have to have an horrendous infestation in the coop for them to seriously affect a healthy chicken and by then it should be pretty obvious.

My guess is that your rooster was already sick but had been hiding his symptoms, as chickens often do and then perhaps had some sort of seizure whilst out in the snow and either died outright or was unable to get up and get back to the coop and the cold finished him off. The only way to find out would have been to send his body for a necropsy or perhaps open him up and look at his organs etc yourself.... if you have sufficient knowledge of chicken anatomy. Sadly I would guess that his body has been disposed of by now, so we will never know.