These are birds that I use for some of my research in agriculture, and they have acquired poultry lice. I ended up adding wood ash in the run for them to dust in, cleaned out the coop and applied 5% seven dust and added in more bedding. There seemed to be very few lice on the birds, and they appear healthy and active. I'm guessing I caught it early. Does this seem sufficient, or should I napalm the place.
You might have caught it early or the lice could be in the cracks of your coop and come out at night to feed on the birds. Usually seeing some on them, is a sign of an infestation. Sorry, I know no one wants to hear that. Did you treat the coop with a delouse solution? If not, I have read from Dawg that you can put a pile of sevin dust, the 5%, at the door of the coop and blow it into the coop with a leaf blower than shut the door till it all settles. With the chickens outside of course
That will get the sevin into every crack in the coop, from what I read. I haven't had to deal with mites or lice...yet..and Lord willing, won't have to, but glad I read up on it, just in case.
Did you do the shake and bake, with the garbage bag, when you treated the birds? Had to laugh when I first read that, than someone asked if it got in their eyes during the process
Of course you leave their head out of the bag!
What kind of research do you do?
Oh, also, birds hide things like disease and parasites well, so it can be hard to determine how bad they really are. Another thing I read was to check at night, when they are at roost with a flashlight around the vent area. Another OP ran a wet cloth over the roost to check for blood as lice are blood suckers and will leave blood traces...but that wasn't as reliable as checking the actual birds at night.
Hope you caught it in time and it wasn't really bad!!!
ETA...you also have to retreat the birds to kill any that hatch from the eggs, but can't remember how long from the first treatment it is...sorry!