help please, first aid for injured chick.

[socks]

I posted this on the wrong section so I'm not as panicked as before but here is the story :
"Sorry, I don't have time to search this more but my favourite chick and one of the few girls (I think) of the 5 1/2 week olds has an injury at her neck. i don't think the others did it I think we did it by accidentally letting a length of fishing line fall into the coop last night.

Not really certain but at her neck some feathers are worn away and the skin seems raw and is red, no actual gaping wound site but definitely worn through . I grabbed her when i saw this, looked up injuries quickly and ran out with the polysporin.....I may have made it worse, now she is scratching at her injuring because of the goop on her feathers.

I guess i have to separate her from the others but how can I stop her from injurying herself more....

thanks for your quick consideration."

o.k. I have separated her (luckily I had picked up a play pen at our recycle center planning for a brooder next year but it is going to be hers tonight. i am wondering about how long I should keep her separate and whether I should really try hard to have her in the pen and run but fenced off from the others. It is easiest for me to just keep her in the house in the brooder but I don't want her picked on (she was already the lowest on the totem pole so maybe that wouldn't happen).

I took a picture but can't find the cord for uploading it to my computer, will soon.

thanks for any help

 

[purpletree23]

IO would continue with the polysporin and keep her separate in the house. She will be nice and warm and safe and away from flies that will cause maggots. I'm sure she is stressed so give her a lot of TLC and extra protein. I like to use scrambled egg (cooled) mixed with cottage cheese. At her age maybe a teaspoon full twice a day. Clean water and food and some nice towels to cuddle up in.

As long as she didn't damage anything in her neck I think she will be fine.

Let us know how she does.

 

[threehorses]

I agree with purple's advice.

If you're concerned about her being integrated later, you could take the smallest and meekest of the other chicks and keep them with her in the brooder. That way when they're reintroduced, the confusion of two 'new kids' sometimes helps the problem. You just have to watch the one addition to make sure she doesn't peck. The buddy will keep her interested. Maybe put something in there that they can mess with to keep them not interested in her sore. (A little bit of something shiney helps - a keychain seems to be the most fascinating thing to chickens ever - as are rings).

Wipe as much of the antibiotic ointment as you can off til it's just a coat on her skin - that might help her. You know, she might have scratched it initially, too. Just a thought. Maybe the scratching is just a continuation of whatever broke the skin in the first place.

In either case, you're doing the right thing.

 

[socks]

Thanks for the advice, I think I might see if her sister can behave with her. No one was actually picking on her but I was really afraid it wouldn't be long as my Ameracauna/leghorn cross (rooster I'm sure) is getting so feisty with everyone else I didn't want to risk it.

I'm uploading a pic but it is fuzzy. It looks like a rope burn to me and I don't think it was there yesterday, I only have 7 birds and I should have told you that last night they were kicking up such a racket when I put them in their coop (we're building the run and tractoring them until then) I was sure something was wrong but couldn't figure it out. They were squeezed into a corner and basically, screaming. They calmed down a tiny bit after 15 minutes but then I thought because they are 'chicken'

they might just be very afraid of all the changes outside their coop since the morning when they left. (Boy, this being a newbie, you just don't know, now I do know that when they howl like that something IS wrong). When i picked them up in the morning everyone acted fine but later I found the fishing line in the corner where they were flipping out and in the afternoon the wound on her.
Here's the fuzzy pic

[/img]

 

[threehorses]

I wonder if she got caught in wire. Are you using a metal chick feeder, by the way?

Honestly the location of that wound - it looks like she's pretty lucky if she got caught in something that she didn't do some really serious damage! She looks very healthy and well feathered otherwise, which is a plus as she has an advanced start to her healing!

 

[socks]

I am using one of those round feeders that are metal bottomed and mason (mines plastic) jar tops.....gee! that makes more sense than the fishing line.
Another update: tonight they (minus her) did pretty much the same freak out as last night all sqeezing into the one corner as if trying to make it through the wall and the noises they made sounded like a horses whinney although not as strong and scary as yesterday still really unnerving and upsetting for a 'new mother'. I really don't get it?

Are those round metal feeders a problem?? In the coop last night I only had a plastic one with water. I do have hardware cloth on the floor of the coop and no roost yet but it is quite small and no one could get their head or foot caught in it.

Here is a clearer picture, not catching the worst of it but you might be able to tell what it was (and she is giving me a pretty little " J'accuse! " eye)

[/img]

 

[threehorses]

The ones that have been the problem so far are the ones that are the metal long ones. There have been some toes lost to them. But where the cut is, to me, looks like she stuck her head in something and then cut it when she tried to remove it - maybe got a little stuck. In any case, it looks pretty good in the picture - pink, dry mostly. Her eyes are certainly bright and clean, the poor dear.

Were they freaking out - or just really fervently trying to get into a pile? The whinny noise is usually a "sleepy" and basically happy noise. That's just weird behavior.

 

[socks]

Well everybody the mystery is solved and sad to say it was our misunderstanding that cost two more chicks their toes last night. I am just putting this up in case anyone searches this and can learn from our mistake. Anyway, it was a raccon and now you can imagine whinneying sound wasn't that sweet trilling sound they make at sleep but the sound of a very frightened bird.

the rest of the post is under predators etc. " Can chicks sense predators???? Or are they just having me on???"

Apparently my first little chick was the victim of a coon trying to pull her through the 1/2" hardware cloth she was sleeping on and the other two of having half their toes bit off because they were dangling out.

Horrible experience for everyone and a stupid newbie mistake thinking they were safe on the 1/2" hardware cloth.

So in the end they either remembered their experience from the night before when I put them in the coop at night or maybe there was a lingering smell of coon. In any case they are back in the house for a couple of nights (with separate hospital wards) while we work on the fort knoxing. I do wonder how we will be able to get them to accept the coop again. I will go out and peroxide everything to see if I can remove smells of coon as well as blood....any suggestions????

and thanks everyone

 

[threehorses]

I have a suggestion, but it bodes poorly for the raccoon. : (

They will do that - they'll literally tear any piece of a chicken off that they can get through wire. I had two pullets killed and one injured once. The others had their legs ripped off through 1x2 wire. The one seemed like her toes were injured. I took her inside, doctored up one foot. I went to get the other and thought "why you little sneak - stop hiding your foot from me".

I kept feeling and realized she had no leg. He had pulled it off right at the body. I thought I would just pass out.

I got a little food-soup into her, but she ended up dying of blood loss that day.

I've lost so many birds to raccoons since - they don't eat them, they teach their babies how to kill and will just kill everything you have it you don't trap them and then either get a wildlife relocater to relocate them to a wildlife area (please don't relocate them yourself), or dispatch them.

And no - raccoons will open latches, cages, and rip anything they can grab through the wire. If you build any coops, always make sure that the corners are all solid so that when the babies go into the corners, that's one place the raccoons can't grab through.

I'm so very sorry. I'll go check the other link.

 

[socks]

Thanks for the advice threehorses. The chicks won't be going back to the coop till we get this sorted out. The injured 3 will be in the playpen hospital in my studio and a friend has an unused coop that no coons got in years ago so we trust it is still sound and he has a noisy dog who chases the local coon up trees .

At this point I don't intend to try to dispatch the coon (I feel like I need to just make the whole set up impenetrable. We have a lot of coons around so it would just be replaced by another and this was our own fault of not understanding how vulnerable they were. Of course give me a few months and I may just be going into the coonskin hat business

I put a couple new pics up of our coop/run set us as it was planned but construction has stopped as we re-think a way to enclose the coop in a separate cage or hoop so the coons can't even pounce on the roof and wait for another 100' of 1 inch hardware cloth to come.

I can imagine how you felt with the missing leg I was in shock at finding them so hurt and felt they were so forgiving when I doctored them and they started their little nightly trilling again (you wouldn't catch me recovering so fast from a missing part of my body). I have them outside today in a melon box with access to a small patch of grass....hope that was o.k. I will clean their feet again tonight....or should I have kept them inside??? I just wanted them to be near their flock and to have some distractions