Pixiejan
Chirping
Not urgent, but would love some advice on what it could be and how to treat.
Dec 9th when we started getting really cold weather I noticed my rooster (olive egger) sounded congested. He was about six months old at the time. My neighbour with more chicken experience said it was likely something respiratory that would pass, I expected it to get worse before it got better but neither really happened and it's never really gone away. There's no discharge from the nose or eyes and never was. For awhile I thought it was just he didn't handle the cold well as it seemed to be worse on the colder days, but we've had a really warm week and symptoms haven't completely gone away. I expected my hens to develop symptoms, but they never showed any signs of congestion or anything! Which has had me kinda stumped.
Symptoms are:
- Congested sound when breathing sometimes, but not always.
- Water drools out of his mouth sometimes when he's drinking.
- Has a tiny bit of a dirty bum, but nothing excessive. I think every once in awhile he has some looser stool that get the feathers dirty and because we've been so cold all winter (we only got above freezing once or twice) and I didn't have a dust bath over the winter for them, he was unable to clean it up.
Over the winter I kept the coop really clean, I picked most of it out daily (the parts I could easily reach which was about 70% of the coop) and about once a week I picked out everywhere. There were only 3 chickens for most of the winter and now I'm just down to 2 and the coop 5' by 5'. We use shavings for bedding. Humidity over the winter in the coop was decent, we live in the high humidity area and the humidity in the coop was almost always lower than outside. When it was really cold he would eat less. He's vaccinated for Mareks and ILT.
More recently I've started them on some fermented feed. I've tried Poultry cell in water & Oregano & Thyme in feed. They had the herbs in their feed for most of the winter. I usually only used the poultry cell in water after we had super cold weather.
Would love some advice on what it might be, the other chickens not showing symptoms seemed odd to me.
I have a few pullets arriving the end of May (though they won't be integrated into the flock until they've been quarantined a month), so I'd love to get this figured out before then.
Dec 9th when we started getting really cold weather I noticed my rooster (olive egger) sounded congested. He was about six months old at the time. My neighbour with more chicken experience said it was likely something respiratory that would pass, I expected it to get worse before it got better but neither really happened and it's never really gone away. There's no discharge from the nose or eyes and never was. For awhile I thought it was just he didn't handle the cold well as it seemed to be worse on the colder days, but we've had a really warm week and symptoms haven't completely gone away. I expected my hens to develop symptoms, but they never showed any signs of congestion or anything! Which has had me kinda stumped.
Symptoms are:
- Congested sound when breathing sometimes, but not always.
- Water drools out of his mouth sometimes when he's drinking.
- Has a tiny bit of a dirty bum, but nothing excessive. I think every once in awhile he has some looser stool that get the feathers dirty and because we've been so cold all winter (we only got above freezing once or twice) and I didn't have a dust bath over the winter for them, he was unable to clean it up.
Over the winter I kept the coop really clean, I picked most of it out daily (the parts I could easily reach which was about 70% of the coop) and about once a week I picked out everywhere. There were only 3 chickens for most of the winter and now I'm just down to 2 and the coop 5' by 5'. We use shavings for bedding. Humidity over the winter in the coop was decent, we live in the high humidity area and the humidity in the coop was almost always lower than outside. When it was really cold he would eat less. He's vaccinated for Mareks and ILT.
More recently I've started them on some fermented feed. I've tried Poultry cell in water & Oregano & Thyme in feed. They had the herbs in their feed for most of the winter. I usually only used the poultry cell in water after we had super cold weather.
Would love some advice on what it might be, the other chickens not showing symptoms seemed odd to me.
I have a few pullets arriving the end of May (though they won't be integrated into the flock until they've been quarantined a month), so I'd love to get this figured out before then.
