new poult acting sick

[kywest]

just got two three week old turkeys yesterday (well, one turned out to be a cornish x...will be trading that for a real turkey today,,hahaha...the wife of the farmer picked it out for me)
anyway, this is my first turkey and he seems very quiet - always laying down, never caught him eating or drinking. I had him under a 200w bulb but he was panting, so switched to a 100w.
should i do anything for him? just give him time to settle in? i worry that i haven't seen him drink...
cornish x is, naturally, giving him a great example of proper eating technique!
thanks!

 

[Steve_of_sandspoultry]

If it was panting it was to hot. One of the best things I have found to get them eating is give a little hard boiled egg yoke. The yellow seems to get their attention. Hopefully they will follow the X and learn by watching it. Keep an eye on them, if they don't eat and drink they will starve out in a couple days.

Steve

 

[ziggywiggy]

I'd put a thermometer in the brooder and keep the temperature around 95. 200 watt is awfully large. I use a 60 watt bulb. Of course, that all depends on the size of your brooder. The key is to keep the temperature around 95.

 

[EggHunter_66]

What we did was give ours a lot of attention, held him a lot and to get him to eat we would have to keep tapping the food with our index finger and he loved to drink out of a water bottle that you would use for a caged rabbit. Once you get him another turkey I think that will help too...we had to get a 2nd one. They are now 2 1/2 months old and they run around in the back yard and they are doing great!

 

[Marshmallow Man]

Isn't 3 weeks kind of old for a lamp? If he is 3 weeks he has obviously been eating and drinking. Did you mean 3 day?

 

[Lagerdogger]

I found that the easiest way to get poults to feed is to give them something out of your hand. That would always get the other poults interested in eating and then I could see that everyone was. But it sounds like you got your bird overheated. If you haven't seen it drink, dip its bill in the water every couple of hours until you are sure it knows where the water is.

The right amount of heat is such that the bird will move throughout the brooder, neither huddling under the light, nor scattered around the edges of the brooder. Of course this is a lot easier to determine if you have two dozen birds running around instead of just one.

I use two 150 watt bulbs, but I have a large brooder and it can be a bit chilly in April and May in Minnesota. At three weeks they start going outside on a screen porch, but I always leave a light on in case they get chilled. At six weeks they are deported to the big wide outside.

I had one poult this year that seemed sluggish like you describe, even though all the other poults were thriving. I thought it would die but it eventually started moving around and now I don't really know which bird it was.