Impacted crop in baby chick - Please help

[Janet Pesaturo]

Looking for advice on helping my 3 day old baby chicks with impacted crop. She stands tall and looks like she's trying to vomit. Crop appears quite large. I picked her up and massaged the crop, hoping to move the contents southward, but instead stuff came up through the mouth.

Diet is standard medicated chick feed. For 1st 24 hrs (I received them the morning of the 28th) I gave plain water, plus water with probiotics, electrolytes, and vitamins, and had them on paper towels. But this afternoon I made the mistake of bringing them outside on grass, which is where problems began. They have chick grit with the food. Back in the brooder with paper towels.

I read elsewhere that some people have been able to hold beak open and remove stuff from crop with tweezers. We've been trying, but cannot hold the tiny beak open, and for the brief moment we do have it open, we can't see down the throat.

What to do??

 

[centrarchid]

Grass may or may not be the problem. I keep birds at such age on grass all the time without problem described so something else likely at play. If something invasive like getting into crop, have a vet do it.

 

[Janet Pesaturo]

The chick already died, but thank you very much for responding. We squeezed all the food out, palpated the crop, and could feel a small, hard thing, still stuck in the crop. Probably not grass. Maybe a too large piece of food (this chick food isn't ground as finely as stuff I've used in the past), or maybe even a piece of shaving (the chicks had been pulling some shavings up at the edges from under the paper towels). In fact, the problem might have started even before I put them out. I now recall noticing that one seemed to have a larger crop than the others while they were still in the brooder box. That chick might have been prone to crop impaction, and if so, it is a relief that she died.

I too tend to put my chicks out on grass as early as possible, and I've never before had this problem, either.

 

[centrarchid]

Something likely wrong before you got involved.