Thorn_shrike
Songster
Hello everyone, I came home this afternoon and found one of my hens dead in the run 
It was extremely sudden, she hadn’t been showing any signs of sickness. No loss in appetite, no lowered energy, no respiratory signs, didn’t feel skinny, normal poop, just came home and found her. I spend a ton of time with my chickens and know immediately when one of them is feeling off or acting strange so this has really been a shock.
She was a 15 month old sapphire gem. To my knowledge she had been laying regularly with no issues.
Findings I wanted to note that are not pictured. I looked all throughout her entire digestive tract and did not find any signs of worms. No mites or lice either. No signs of external trauma, it wasn’t an attack and everyone else seems fine. Her comb and wattles did look on the pale side when I found her but their color had been fine up until that point. Her abdomen wasn’t filled with fluid but to me at least she seemed to have a lot of fat. Her gizzard looked healthy on the inside, again quite a bit of fat surrounding it. I didn’t find any tumors anywhere in her reproductive tract or just hanging out in her abdominal cavity.
The biggest thing, which you’ll see in the pics is her liver. Definitely something wrong with it but idk what it means? Her heart also looked small to me but I’m no expert. Bile duct looked large too, not sure if it actually was or not but it was much bigger than I’ve seen in the one other necropsy I’ve done.
I think it was Fatty Liver Hemorrhagic Syndrome based on how big her liver was, how off it looked, the amount of fat in her abdomen and how sudden her death was but please let me know if that’s wrong or if you have any other ideas.
Sorry I didn’t get the best photos of everything, this is only the second time I’ve opened one of my girls up to try to see what happened.
It was extremely sudden, she hadn’t been showing any signs of sickness. No loss in appetite, no lowered energy, no respiratory signs, didn’t feel skinny, normal poop, just came home and found her. I spend a ton of time with my chickens and know immediately when one of them is feeling off or acting strange so this has really been a shock.
She was a 15 month old sapphire gem. To my knowledge she had been laying regularly with no issues.
Findings I wanted to note that are not pictured. I looked all throughout her entire digestive tract and did not find any signs of worms. No mites or lice either. No signs of external trauma, it wasn’t an attack and everyone else seems fine. Her comb and wattles did look on the pale side when I found her but their color had been fine up until that point. Her abdomen wasn’t filled with fluid but to me at least she seemed to have a lot of fat. Her gizzard looked healthy on the inside, again quite a bit of fat surrounding it. I didn’t find any tumors anywhere in her reproductive tract or just hanging out in her abdominal cavity.
The biggest thing, which you’ll see in the pics is her liver. Definitely something wrong with it but idk what it means? Her heart also looked small to me but I’m no expert. Bile duct looked large too, not sure if it actually was or not but it was much bigger than I’ve seen in the one other necropsy I’ve done.
I think it was Fatty Liver Hemorrhagic Syndrome based on how big her liver was, how off it looked, the amount of fat in her abdomen and how sudden her death was but please let me know if that’s wrong or if you have any other ideas.
Sorry I didn’t get the best photos of everything, this is only the second time I’ve opened one of my girls up to try to see what happened.
Call your state lab and ask for the email address of the head avian pathologist, and email those pictures to them.
