Maggots....

[AmberRex]

I have a two year old hen who I noticed yesterday she wasnt acting right. She is wild and wont let us touch her so I dont handle her much. I finally caught her today and found her problem. She has at least an inch deep hole on her hip...close to her vent. well there are maggots in it. I called our vet and he said all we could do is clean her up with dawn dish detergent and if it doesnt help put her down. I had already cleaned her up and seperated her from the flock but I cant get the maggots out. I am pretty sure she is too far gone and is going to have to be put down but I am just concerned as to why this would happen and want to prevent this problem from happing to the rest of my flock. This particular hen was missing on tuesday when i put them up for the afternoon in their run. When my husband shut the coop door that night he said somehow she found her way in. We just wonder if something got after her and she got away or if when she got back in she scratched herself but we never noticed a wound on her. she started acting funny yesterday. This hen also keeps nasty feathers covered in fecal matter on her bottom. She isnt the only hen that has that problem but not all of my hens have that problem either. This has been going on for about a year now...they had worms and I have wormed them a few times for this and cleaned them up and I have also had to clipped off the nasty feathers but some of them are just nasty agian the next day. I am going to take a fecal sample to the vet to be sure they dont have any bacterial problems but this has been going on for a year and none of them have had any problems other than a nasty rear end. They free range for most of the day and I check them every so often for mites and lice , I dust them down if i find any but they also have dusting holes in the yard and i have one in the run for when they cant get out. I clean out the coop every 3-6 months so i really dont know what else to do to keep them healthy. Its use less to clean up their rear ends cause its just nasty the next day. I feed them layer pellets, a little scratch, Black oil sun flower seeds, every so often i put probiotics and electrolites in there water and i give them apple cider vinager too. Does this sound like maybe she hurt herself and the flies laid their eggs in the wound or flies laid some eggs on her messy feathers? Any ideas?

Yeah it sounds as though she has maybe impaled herself or been caught by something and the flies have taken advantage of it. The good thing about maggots though is that they aren't really eating her because they only eat dead flesh so although it would be good to get rid of them they are causing her no further damage than preventing a scab from forming so the wound won't be able to heal properly. Like everyone else has said, trim the fecal covered feathers so that they don't attract more flies. Hope this helps!

 

[BarredRockMom]

This is all good information. I just found one of my hens with two holes in her bum, just below the vent. The holes aren't very large & there were maggots in each, but I think I got (most of) them out before deciding that she probably needed a Vet's help. I figured that at the very least, they'd flush the wound, give an Rx, clean out the dead tissue & pack the holes with antibiotic ointment. (You know, like they'd do for a person or a dog.)

When they finally decided that they'd at least look at my girl & determine if they were "comfortable treating her", the Tech told me to "bring her in" so she could "take her back." I said that I'd go too & she looked like she'd never heard of such a thing. "Well, we generally don't have the owners come back." "She's a chicken. She's got two wounds that need cleaning & possibly debriding. It's WAY past her bedtime, she's already stressed from the evening's events--including the car ride, and I don't think she's going to like being without me. So if the Vet can triage her in the room with me & treat her there, then you wouldn't have to worry about me going in the back, where you're providing the critical care." Seriously? Ya just told me that you're not sure that anyone's comfortable treating a chicken & you expect me to just hand her over to you and hope you know how to hold her? And pace around wondering if she's freaking out, flying around back there? Are you high?

So perhaps you can imagine my surprise when the Vet came into the room, took a look and said "Well, when we see this, we usually euthanize since we can't tell how far in the damage & maggots go." I hope you're all picturing an even more surprised face when I said "Yeah, that's not even close to going to happen. What else ya got? How about we flush the wound, debrid the area, get her on an antibiotic & see what that does?"

So I got the flush, some additional solution to flush on my own & 5 days of Rx. Yeah, last time for that bs. And it's not even about the $. Sure I could do it myself, but I really thought they'd treat it like any other animal's wound. And I thought that the dead tissue had to be cut off, which is WHY I went to begin with. But no.

So, hopefully my girl will rebound & be ok. Since the lower hole is the size of a #2 pencil eraser & the higher one is a little bigger than that, I'm hoping that I caught it in time.

 

[BarredRockMom]

Pico is feeling much better. She's more resistant to taking her medication, which means that I've had to work around her reluctance by squirting her meds in the palm of my hand & mixing with sunflower seeds. No problem! The wounds are healing up quite nicely, too. I've seen no more evidence of maggots, but even if there were any remaining, unhatched eggs, the neosporin surely suffocated them.

And I'll remember to check THIS site first for problems with my girls! (My husband is very happy about that!)

 

[BarredRockMom]

Just did a "bum check" on my girl & found her wounds completely healed, thankfully! Because of this incident, I've set a reminder in my calendar for everyone to get checked once per week. The girls are SO not happy to be subjected to the indignity of it all, lol, but they tolerate it. Small price to pay for healthy chicken bums, I say!! Dang...Fly Strike...what a pain in the feathered egg butt!!

 

[ald]

I will trim feathers if the hen is really sickly as a last resort but whenever you cut feathers you are just begging for feather mites to move into the open quills.
found that out the hard way.

 

[DuckRaiser]

Do maggot eggs kill chickens? Do they lay eggs in chicken poo?

 

[BarredRockMom]

I would imagine that any time there is animal waste, flies could use it to lay eggs. Having flies around the chickens seems to be unavoidable, but I personally take a pitchfork to the dirt & turn it over all week long. I smooth out the dirt with a garden rake and call it good. It seems to work for my flock, as I've had no other problems. I've done that all along, so I guess the heat played a role in the original 'fly strike turned into maggots on the fluffy egg butt' problem. We now have regular bum checks, too.

As for whether or not maggots could kill a chicken, I'd say that any time a parasite attaches itself to one of your animals it's not generally a benefit for the animal. I know that maggots are used in human medicine to clear away dead skin, but it's a controlled application and they are not left unmonitored. In my girl's case, her tissue was fine before they started to eating away at her. I'm glad she showed me, or I would not have caught it that night. Had I not caught it when I did, I'm sure it would've killed her.

Hope this helps you.

 

[DuckRaiser]

I would imagine that any time there is animal waste, flies could use it to lay eggs. Having flies around the chickens seems to be unavoidable, but I personally take a pitchfork to the dirt & turn it over all week long. I smooth out the dirt with a garden rake and call it good. It seems to work for my flock, as I've had no other problems. I've done that all along, so I guess the heat played a role in the original 'fly strike turned into maggots on the fluffy egg butt' problem. We now have regular bum checks, too.

As for whether or not maggots could kill a chicken, I'd say that any time a parasite attaches itself to one of your animals it's not generally a benefit for the animal. I know that maggots are used in human medicine to clear away dead skin, but it's a controlled application and they are not left unmonitored. In my girl's case, her tissue was fine before they started to eating away at her. I'm glad she showed me, or I would not have caught it that night. Had I not caught it when I did, I'm sure it would've killed her.

Hope this helps you.

Thank you for replying!