MITES!
I'm only yelling because I'm upset.
I never noticed them. They're small. Really, really small. Freakishly small. The chickens seem healthy, happy, noisy. Eating, pooping, scratching, trying to find ways into the garden. Egg production is down, and one's sort of raggedy looking, but molt season is starting. And then, I pick up an egg. Something on the egg MOVES! I freak, adrenaline floods my brain, and I throw said egg like a young Randy Johnson throws a fastball (sans mullet).
I calm myself, and fingertips prickling, pick up another egg. Teeny, tiny, little bugs, blackish brown, are on the eggs. So they must be on the walls. The roost. In the nest boxes, which are made of wood. The whole dang coop is made of wood, with VCT tile for a floor and halfway up the walls. My skin crawls. I can't see them, but they have to be there. I pick up each bird (catch them with the Hubs' long-handled fishing net, more like, because they don't really like people and even if you have food, they prefer you lay down your offering and back away slowly) and while in my brain, I KNOW the bugs are there, I can't find any. And I then think to myself, 'if my free range chickens picked up lice or mites or whatever from wild birds, then they probably picked up worms, too,' which squeeks me out even more. So I run to Big R (our local farm store) and go crazy. Permethrin, DE, Stall-Dri, new nest boxes, new pine shavings, Panacur, Save-A-Chick for when the Panacur blows out their chick-tums.
I'm itching. I'm squirming, just thinking about it all, because what if there's mites on me?!
The checkout lady must think I've got the beginning stages of mad cow disease. Maybe she's not wrong.
I get home, load up my syringes, and with mathematical precision (because I'm a pharmacy tech) and huge green dish gloves (because I'm a coward), I mix up my targeted poisons, and get to work.
It's a rodeo. Nobody wants wormed (apple-cinnamon flavored or not), nobody wants sprayed, nobody wants Vaseline on their legs (because I'm sure there's mites in their scales), nobody wants to be touched, handled, talked sweet to, and certainly not wrapped in a towel-burrito and told to hold still.
But I get the wormer down, soak their butts and armpits and shoulders and little angry squawky heads with Permethrin. I tear apart the nest boxes and replace them with plastic ones, clean everything out, spray everything with bleach solution, and then DROWN the whole shebang in Permethrin. The inside, the outside, the doors, the windows, the cracks and crannies, even the run. I rake the run, sprinkle DE in the holes they excavate. I put up fly traps because, hey, why not?
That all said, is there anything else I should be doing?
I'm only yelling because I'm upset.
I never noticed them. They're small. Really, really small. Freakishly small. The chickens seem healthy, happy, noisy. Eating, pooping, scratching, trying to find ways into the garden. Egg production is down, and one's sort of raggedy looking, but molt season is starting. And then, I pick up an egg. Something on the egg MOVES! I freak, adrenaline floods my brain, and I throw said egg like a young Randy Johnson throws a fastball (sans mullet).
I calm myself, and fingertips prickling, pick up another egg. Teeny, tiny, little bugs, blackish brown, are on the eggs. So they must be on the walls. The roost. In the nest boxes, which are made of wood. The whole dang coop is made of wood, with VCT tile for a floor and halfway up the walls. My skin crawls. I can't see them, but they have to be there. I pick up each bird (catch them with the Hubs' long-handled fishing net, more like, because they don't really like people and even if you have food, they prefer you lay down your offering and back away slowly) and while in my brain, I KNOW the bugs are there, I can't find any. And I then think to myself, 'if my free range chickens picked up lice or mites or whatever from wild birds, then they probably picked up worms, too,' which squeeks me out even more. So I run to Big R (our local farm store) and go crazy. Permethrin, DE, Stall-Dri, new nest boxes, new pine shavings, Panacur, Save-A-Chick for when the Panacur blows out their chick-tums.
I'm itching. I'm squirming, just thinking about it all, because what if there's mites on me?!
The checkout lady must think I've got the beginning stages of mad cow disease. Maybe she's not wrong.
I get home, load up my syringes, and with mathematical precision (because I'm a pharmacy tech) and huge green dish gloves (because I'm a coward), I mix up my targeted poisons, and get to work.
It's a rodeo. Nobody wants wormed (apple-cinnamon flavored or not), nobody wants sprayed, nobody wants Vaseline on their legs (because I'm sure there's mites in their scales), nobody wants to be touched, handled, talked sweet to, and certainly not wrapped in a towel-burrito and told to hold still.
But I get the wormer down, soak their butts and armpits and shoulders and little angry squawky heads with Permethrin. I tear apart the nest boxes and replace them with plastic ones, clean everything out, spray everything with bleach solution, and then DROWN the whole shebang in Permethrin. The inside, the outside, the doors, the windows, the cracks and crannies, even the run. I rake the run, sprinkle DE in the holes they excavate. I put up fly traps because, hey, why not?
That all said, is there anything else I should be doing?
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