I showed my chickens at afair last year and they came back with lice. We never had lice before. We didnt know the lice came with us until I was reaching for a chicken and a couple lice fell on my head from the chicken. I reached up, pulled off a louse, screamed and ran back to the house. I took two showers and after I read about lice. It turns out that poultry lice is different than the kind of lice that people can get. Poultry lice are a chewing or biting lice where as the kind people can get is blood sucking.
Poultry lice are a small (1/4 inch) yellowish-brown bug that feeds on the blood of poultry, making it a parasite. Parasites are harmful to birds. They can be come so irritating the birds do not eat or sleep well and egg production can drop. Birds can even injure themselves by scratching and pecking themselves out of frustration. Lice can even kill young birds that are infected with them.
A louse (a single lice) lives for several months and spends its entire life on a birds body. The female lays eggs and glues them to the birds feather shaft. The nits hatch four to seven days later. Over the next few months the nit matures and then lays its own eggs. It can lay 300 eggs in its lifetime. With one generation being born every 3 weeks after just a few months the original pair of lice can become 120,000. Lice can also live for a week away from the bird.
Lice can be transmitted through contaminated supplies or birds. That is why it is so important to wash your birds after showing and to quarantine them to minimize the chance of spreading lice to the rest of your flock.
Please see the following steps to treat your birds for lice.
I showed my chickens at county fair
last year. We came home with lice.
This is a picture of me with Goliath,
How to treat a chicken for Lice
About two weeks after I came home from fair I noticed the white silkie chickens pecking themselves. I picked one up and I got a louse on me. The silkies were trying to peck at the lice chewing on them.
We went to the store and bought lice powder. We dusted them with it and kept them separate for two weeks treating them every week with the powder. We didnt see lice in the rest of the flock. We still saw lice on the silkies after the two weeks so we decided to give them a bath. We applied a lice shampoo designed for people that we bought from
Wal-mart following the directions of letting the medication sit on their skin for five minutes.
Then we washed them in the bath water. Silkies look funny when they are wet? They actually liked the warm water after they got used to it.
When they were done we wrapped them in a towel to dry them off. Then we dusted them with lice powder.
Then I cleaned and disinfected the cage they were living in an all the bowls they used for food and water.
Unfortunately this wasnt the end of the lice for us. The rest of the flock ended up having them and we had to bathe them all. We also had to clean and disinfect the entire coop. We were able to save them all but one, Goliath.
The worst part was that Goliath was too far gone to save. He was so covered in lice and lice eggs that each feather shaft on his body around his neck had a cluster of eggs. We started to pluck out his feathers hoping to save him, but we realized that we would end up with a bird having to be plucked alive and ending up with no feathers. It wasnt fair to him to endure this, even though he was a great breeding bird and a nice pet. We had to cull him.
