Im glad to hear that your girl is doing better today! Since shes going to make it through that, its time to start the real fight and not only get her back on track, but see whats caused this and help you help your entire flock.
First, Its important that this girl and the rest of your flock get what I call a Chicken Check Up. This is a necessary part of flock keeping that will go miles to prevent surprise illnesses and help you monitor just exactly how your chickens are doing.
First, the keel bone. I noticed in the picture that the keel bone (the bone running through the center of the chest and down underneath the belly, like the keel of a boat) is quite sharp. In a normally nourished bird, you should be able to feel the keel bones ridge slightly. But, like the keel of a boat, both sides of the keel bone should be filled out in a pleasant rounded fashion. Too much, creating cleavage, is overweight. Too little and a sharp, protruding keel, is underweight. Youll want to check all your other hens as well. If you find one with a sharp keel, mark the top of her head with a tiny dot from a sharpy marker. That way you can continue to monitor her weight. The mark will disappear and is hardly noticeable anyway. Treat any birds you find with a sharp keel just as you will this one to avoid them getting to the state this bird has.
Second, parasites are very common in poultry. They can take an otherwise healthy bird and cause them to be anemic, weak, and then emaciated in short order. Pick up your hen and check all of her feathers thoroughly. Be particularly vigilant at the vent where the warmth and moisture draw many parasites. Check there for eggs at the bases of the feathers, and indeed everywhere. Also look for lice and other parasites that crawl along the spine of the feathers. Checking a bird on a white sheet also can help you find mites. If you find any such creatures, they must be treated and then retreated once or twice after their eggs would hatch.
Third, as a poultry owner you will become quite versed in droppings. Droppings are probably the most important indication of what is going on internally with our poultry. Here is a wonderful posting of various droppings and what they can indicate:
http://happyhenhouse.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=poop&action=display&thread=7588
**Can you please tell us what your birds droppings look like? Also, youll always want to keep an eye of the droppings of your entire flock. The droppings should be mostly normal (the greenish tannish with white urates on top) with occasional cecal droppings (more like chocolate pudding).
Fourth, monitoring feeding. Chickens are natural bullies (thus the term pecking order). In any flock, large or small, there are going to be bird that just get less feed. In larger flocks, these birds have to wait til all the other birds have eaten. Sometimes that never happens so the birds slowly starve. I highly suspect this is what has happened to your hen. You will want to take a half hour or so every month and just get a lawn chair, maybe a book, and sit out with your birds. Theyll act differently when you first come out than they will if you sit and relax. Thats when their true behavior is clear. Watch to see who gets bullied, who gets to eat first and who eats last, etc. Make sure if there is a great deal of bullying that there are multiple feeding stations placed far apart. The same with watering stations. Then monitor to see that all birds are eating before the food is gone. We dont want to leave out food overnight, but we also dont want the food to disappear before the lower girls on the pecking order get fed.
Normally, worms would be a consideration. In this case, until I hear otherwise about droppings, Im going to say it would be one of my last choices of the cause. This is because you have a new flock on new ground and theyre quite young. I usually like to worm my birds for the first time around three to six months, depending on whether or not Im using natural methods of worm prevention (I use that word lightly they dont really prevent worms, but more so hamper them a bit). So well put this on the back burner.
NOW: fixing this. Your bird, being ill, has probably depleted most of her good bacteria and nutrition and fat. The good bacteria are literally what allow your bird to digest any of their food they feed your bird. Without them, your bird will waste away and die. During illness, stress, and medicating, they die off. Without a good source of food, they die off. Your bird has both. So lets replace the beneficial bacteria using live bacteria in a probiotic. The most common and easily found inexpensive choice is plain yogurt, live culture. Read the label and make sure, but most store brands are live cultlure. Another option, and a darn good one, are acidophilus capsules or tablets from the grocer, health food store, pharmacy. If you try the health food store, look for ones for yeast infections. They contain a special bacteria called B. bifidum that are particularly helpful. Most probiotics contain various lactobacillus, however, and thats fine.
In addition to new bacteria, your bird will need something to encourage those bacteria to thrive and colonize the gut, living there and keeping your bird healthy. I use plain unsweetened applesauce. You can even put apple meat in a blender and make a sauce out of it. The pectin in apples is the ideal prebiotic or substance that bacteria eat which makes them thrive. It will also clean out any gunk in your birds system and allow for better absorbtion. The slight acidity of the apple (you dont want too much) will also adjust the pH of the gut to where its supposed to be, very important.
We need super nutrients put back into your bird because shes anemic. Add fat to the mix for her neurological system and, of course, weight. The best choice for this that birds can rarely resist is boiled egg yolk. Boil one, use what you can for just one small treat, and slice and freeze the rest for later use. Yolks are also a beautiful source of protein, great in cases except for true coccidiosis. In the case of your bird, shes so emaciated that I wouldnt even care if she had coccidiosis as far as the egg goes Id give it to her. She needs fuel.
If youre not feeding crumbles, put her pellets in the blender and make a ziplock baggy of crumbles. You can mix the yolk, applesauce, some water (laced with karo, pedialyte, Gatorade, or honey), a bit of milk, and make a mash. Save a little aside to mix the yogurt into. Refrigerate the rest for the rest of the week. Mix the yogurt into it and feed this to her as a treat. If she wont eat it, you can put some yogurt into her mouth, and offer just the egg yolk if you have to. The apple sauce isnt necessary but it does help (and chickens like the taste so it encourages them to gobble down their healthy treat.)
Make sure shes drinking a good deal. Adding one ounce of organic apple cider vinegar to a gallon of her drinking water will not only add yet MORE good bacteria, but also act as a healthy electrolyte, increase calcium absorbtion for laying chickens, and act as a prebiotic much as apples did. Organic still has living bacteria in it, the mother of the ACV.
Do this for a day please tell us her dropping consistency, what she reveals about herself once she has some energy to, and then lets see if we can figure out if something other than bullying caused this issue.
Im available for PMs most days throughout the day and late into the night. Feel free to contact me if you have ANY questions. I specialize in loving what others call stupid questions because those are usually the ones from which we learn the most. I sure did!
Being weak, dehydrated, or malnourished can be a vicious cycle. If the other chicks bullied her and wouldn't let her eat, then she got weak and less able to fend for herself....the more she NEEDED the food, the less she could get to it.
