Help! Unknown peacock malaise despite de-worming and coccidiosis treatment

Dear Peafowl-lovers,

Please can you help me? We inherited 3 peacocks and 1 peahen (not ideal, I realise) from the previous owners of the house we just bought in rural France. We've had no real problems with any of them (except for the peahen not laying or sitting) but the largest of the peacocks has gone really downhill in recent days and we cannot find out why. I've been trawling the internet and the forum posts but can't find a solution.

There are no real symptoms other than that he's very listless, hardly interested in food (although seems to be looking for it a lot, he only pecks once or twice when he finds it) and is so droopy - his tail and wing feathers just hang down and his head seems sad - I can't find any other way to describe it. He's also spending more time next to the house, sitting in the bushes, than he used to. He'd the boss of the group normally, and the peahen's favourite, so he's a pretty magnificent fellow, but he's very much not himself now.

We are treating all of our free-ranging flock of chickens, peafowl and pigeons for coccidiosis at the moment after the loss of our peachick and a mystery leg illness in one young cockerel, and we've given them all worming pills - ones that go for roundworm and tapeworm. This was the advice of the local vet, but it doesn't seem to have improved things for him. We wormed him about 4 days ago and he looked quite a bit better yesterday, but today he is bad again. Is it possible it is just taking him a while to get over a worm or parasite infestation? Are there any things we may not have killed with the worming tablets? I know that peafowl can get a wider range of worms than other birds but thought that treatment that covers round and tape worms should cover it.

We've also done a bit of treatment in the water with chicken multivitamins - B2, B12 and K - but I think that started after he began to look bad.

Any thoughts would be gratefully received. I suppose it could be lice on the body, but he really, really doesn't like getting caught and I wouldn't want to stress him unnecessarily if it can't be that.

Thank you so much for reading this!

Amy

 

Hey there - thanks for all your replies. They helped me persuade my husband (who is of the wait and see persuasion) that it was serious enough to take him to the vet. We managed to get an appointment for this afternoon and took him down there, wrapped up in a blanket (poor boy as it's really hot at the moment.

This morning I had the fortune to see him poop and saw that it was yellow, watery and frothy, which made the diagnosis of blackhead pretty straightforward.

We've put him alone in a hayloft (our peafowl are normally completely free range) with some water and some bread soaked in water (his favourite) with Trichorex in it (the active ingredient is Ronidazole). We were pretty lucky with the vet as she doesn't normally treat peafowl but took the time to look it up. She was also very flexible with us because in France it's technically illegal for her to sell us this medicine for poultry, but she said there wasn't anything else available.

I'm hoping once he's calmed down a bit he'll get stuck into the food and water. The surprising thing to me has been that he's continued eating and drinking even when looking so weak and sick. In fact he seems to be seeking out food even more.

I've also popped some hot sauce in is food, to give the capsicum theory a go.

I'm really nervous for him as I think we left it too long (we've inherited peacocks from previous owners of our house so are still learning the ropes).

I'll let you know how we get on.

Do you advise treating the other three peafowl right away or waiting to see if they get sick? They all seem very jolly and active right now and there's never been any who came down with anything before, in spite of spending quite a lot of time around the chickens.

 

There are much tighter controls on purchasing medication in France, and since I don't speak French well enough it's hard to get onto French forums like this (plus the French don't seem to like the internet as much as Brits or Americans!) So it's a lot harder to track down what a broad range, legal wormer might be for them. When we took the peacock to the vet this afternoon she confirmed it was probably Blackhead, but I also asked about the worming tablets she had given us before, that I referred to above (we had consulted a vet in the first place over some strange symptoms in our chickens). She said that the one she gave us was the most broad spectrum available for poultry. It's called Teniverm and contains Levamisole hydrochloride and Niclosamide. According to what I can find online, the latter treats tapeworm and the former is a general dewormer given to cattle, pigs and sheep. I think that this is all I will be able to get my hands on here. Does it sound like this is broad spectrum enough? Can you give me any ingredients for ones you use so that I can try to source them if not? The vet is very helpful and will try to help us if possible. She's just more used to dealing with cows and sheep!