Lice, please help my girls

[julie1015]

Can having lice really kill them?

 

[Jackie B.]

Quote:
Oh yeah. The little blood suckers make them anemic and it's a slow death.

-Jackie

 

[Theicequeen]

Quote:
Oh yeah. The little blood suckers make them anemic and it's a slow death.

-Jackie

:*(

 

[Cuttlefishherder]

We didn't wait to eat the eggs, we just washed them off because there was probably sevin dust on them, but not in them.

Chicken lice is evil,we caught ours before we lost any birds but We felt so bad, because one chicken had it so bad that he probably wouldn't have made the week if we hadn't found them when we did.

Don't blame your self too much. We cant control outside elements like wild birds. I hope your ladies get well soon!

 

[calicokat]

A great tip I got here is to buy a sample size bottle of baby powder. Pop off the lid and dump the powder out. Then fill the container with the Sevin and pop the lid back on. BE SURE TO MARK THE BOTTLE "SEVIN - POISON" or something so no one grabs it to powder any people!

The smaller size container and being able to squeeze it for a puff made it possible for me to dust them all by myself.

Tomorrow is day 10 for us so we'll be re-dusting and then taking out all the bedding and dusting the coop then all new bedding (again, after doing it on Day 1).

My ditzy SIL when I told her what we had to do to treat them, just laughed and said "Oh Lice is just natural. All birds get it. Just clean 'em up for the fair is all"

 

[bentmtnhen]

There should be something on the label to tell if it can get in the eggs.
Lice on critters is a lot like aphids in the garden-just happens sometimes. Don't fret it a bit!
Keep us up-to-date!!

 

[skeeterkiller]

Why use chemicals when food grade (must be food grade, not the stuff they use for pool filters) diatomaceus earth is actually beneficial to animals and kills insects (only insects). It's inexpensive, can be bought though your feed supplier and EASY to use. Wear gloves and a dust mask (DE is like talc and not pleasant to breath and it dries skin). Pick a time when the chickens are out of the coop (not totally necessary but for the animals comfort). LIBERALY dust all walls, floor, bedding and nest areas, just throw handfulls of the DE on everything! Go outside and dust the run. Give the animals a "dust bath" area of DE. This works on lice, ticks, fleas, mites, bedbugs etc. You can look it up DirtDoctor.com is one good site. Use chemicals only when necessary!

 

[bentmtnhen]

I'm with skeeterkiller. I'm using DE in between complete bedding changes in my brooder, & will use it in the coop when they move outside too. Planning to use it in the dust bath, once the birds stop bathing in the pine bedding.
I'm new to chickens, but have been researching for months & DE seems like the safest answer to me for prevention. I don't know how well it could handle a heavy infestation, though.
Anxious to hear how the birdies are doing, and if the dust was effective!!

 

[Theicequeen]

so far so good, no more dead chickies :*( we are doing a complete coop clean out today and i will put lots of DE down, but i think at the point i was it was bad and the Sevin would have worked the best. I am just so sorry that i lost 3 of my girls before realizing this.

 

[fastmari]

Dear lady; You are right to worry about parasites transmitting diseases and other micro parasites to humans or other pets/animals, and your responders have given you great ways to use the very effective sevin, all that we ever had to use, against lice. There seem to be several sizes and they have different stages of size, different types of evidence of their juvenile and cocoon stages, which those bald spots on your chickens indicate they had something causing loss of plumage. You might see balls or lumps of whitish stuff, like popcorn, from the size of a pinhead to a quail egg size, usually at the base of feathers, and rump area can be the worst, although the area at the breast, where hens usually have lost feathers to nesting, hard breeding and parasites. The liquid sevin was formerly an agriculture/horticulture application, as the powder was, and I agree with your responder who wisely tells you that the powder form sticks well to a bird...my turkeys have been lice free for months from one good application of sevin powder, but it must be when the lice are in early stages. the sevin appears to actually kill the nits, a seed like attachment to feather bases that cocoons the fetal lice; because these structures are dried up and dead a week later with no new hatched lice on the birds. However, should your infestation get as bad as you described; with floppy, underweight birds; you then have secondary medical conditions that we have followed breeders recomendations on: Tetracycline from the animal medicine counters at the agriculture supply stores, the water soluble form has successfully killed whatever has opportunistically attacked the lice-weakened birds, especially coccidiosis if it is present in the environment, which it is rampant in our area and others, tetracycline powder at a 4 tablespoonfulls in a quart mason jar full with clean water, boiled and cooled if possible, and your ill appearing birds of underweight, underactive; give an eyedropper full if they will not suck some up with a beak dipped in it. we have never lost a bird that has been given a dose of 4 mls to 10 mls of this tetracycline to water ratio by their mouth, unless they were too far gone. After a week of daily dosing, you should pursue a wormer ration by mouth, like wazine which is also water soluble. It is difficult to divide down the huge flock dosing that these manufacturers print on labels, but with an hour of brain busting, you can do it, looking up conversions of liters, mls, cc's which are hte same as ml's, ounces, quarts, gallons, etc. Once, I wrote down a chart for each of these medicines, and pasted it to our mason jar shelf, so when we went to get one for making medicine, we could look up how many tablespoons or teaspoons to mix into our quart, that one quarter of a gallon. while you can make a regimen of wazine twice a year in your water containers in pens, so that over the course of a few days, every member of that pen got some medicine, it is necessary to treat sick birds right away, without burning a hole in their gut with caustic meds, like we know that antibiotics are....just try tasting that diluted liquid medicine you are giving to your birds. we like to mix in water soluble probiotics, vitamins, proteins like musclebuilding powders we use on ourselves that mix with milk...speaking of milk, any available goat milk is the best thing for ill creatures. good luck, and always remember that weekly picking up of your birds is the best way to acquaint yourself with their healthy weight, so that when they slip down, you can identify a problem before it detracts too much of their available vigor. birds can go fast, so you have to be faster.