With mites and lice, you have to dust the birds thoroughly. Use Adams Flea and Tick mist on their heads by making a paper towel into a cone and spraying the tiny end of the cone. (Wearing gloves), use that portion to wipe onto their heads, their 'beards', etc. Cover their head with your hand (not the one with adams on it) and spray well under their feathers at the back of their neck. Use PERMETHRIN dust on the rest of their bodies. Or you can use adams in hard to reach places. If you use it near the vent (I prefer dust there) please cover their cloaca with two or three fingers to prevent spraying the opening. Adams is alcohol based. (Say it with me: OUCH). It won't sting the rest of the body.
Use dust where they can preen. Ruffle their feathers to get it all against their skin.
Repeat all in 7 days until they're off the birds.
Treat the coops and bedding.
Scrape the bedding aside - dust with PERMETHRIN dust - replace bedding. Dust on the bedding, stir in.
You can use Permethin liquid on the wood in the coops to kill mites. Mites spend their time OFF the bird which is what makes them so difficult to see and treat! With mites, you must treat the cracks in the wood and three feet up off the bedding on the walls. The spray on permethrin 10% is safe for this purpose and will kill the hatching mites. Also treat the bedding with the dust as with lice.
In TheOldDays they used to use creosote on the wood to seal cracks and help prevent mite issues. These days we don't because of health issues, but painting the inside of the coops ( making sure to let a lot of that paint get into the cracks, or caulking) really will help make future cleanup and treatment easier.
Mites can't totally be prevented (as wild birds bring them in) but you really can help them from being a problem by treating an infestation correctly and using the dust/permething on the premises whenever you do your regular coop cleaning.
This year I had a terrible quick infestation with blood sucking lice. (Maybe from a goat, possibly from a vulture who unfortunately had no other place but ours to find water in our drought.) They were not the wheat colored ones, but the grey ones that turn dark when they take blood. (They look a bit like an upside down exclaimation point only very tiny.) I had wheat colored head lice on my chickens, but very few of them. Because of the immediacy of the problem with the blood sucking lice I treated with pour-on ivermectin. I watched every bird carefully. It took three days for all lice to feed. First day, most were gone but there were still some. Day 2 there were a few, but very few. Day three I only saw a couple. Day four until now, there are none. Ivermectin in cattle is said to have a 28 day effectiveness on blood-taking lice. Cattle are different than birds, a way slower metabolism, but I know that the lice were treated for three days as the ivermectin penetrated my birds' systems.
My birds are not intended for food, and I withdrew for 14 days on eggs as ivermectin is not labeled for poultry use and because I always do that any time my birds might shed worms. Yuck. (Ivermectin also removes worms.)
