one of my babies has curved neck

[Rooster'swife]

My biddies have been hatching since Monday, the day after they were due but last night I had the sweetest little black bantam chick hatch out so adorable and when I got up this morning to check on him he keeps falling over and can't hold his head up. Can someone tell me what may have caused that. Maybe in the egg to long? This is my first time using bator so learning but I don't want to create something that suffers so I am trying to learn all I can before I do my next setting. Two more hatched this morning and one seems kind of weak but the other doing ok.

 

[Judy]

You might try a search on wry neck or Marek's and see what you think. Or read some of the info in the stickies at the top of the Raising Baby Chicks forum.

 

[zoa]

we have one with a bent neck too= the guy we got him from said he was in the egg too long and assumed that the chick wouldn't make it... after a week the chick was still hanging in there. My daughter took pity of it and brought the chick home. He seems to be doing ok, he stays with the other chicks and eats and drinks ok. He just looks so odd, and it looks painful when he walks around. I don't know what will happen to him, but he seems to have a will to live!

 

[ralleia]

We had one the first time I order chicks. I unwisely chose a place that was inexperienced doing mail-order live chicks and a few had problems. This little guy's head was essentially upside-down.

I wanted to put it out, but amid the clamor from my step-daughters I relented.

I wish I'd killed it. We had to make special accommodations (lower feeder, lower water, etc.), which ended up making the food and water dirtier and poop-filled for ALL the chickens. He never grew full-sized, and ended up dying anyway within two years.

If you keep chickens for pragmatic reasons at all, then keeping a crippled chicken is foolishness.

 

[dwegg]

I have a little boy with a crooked neck who is 7 weeks old tomorrow and he has grown at the same rate as the others, eats and drinks fine but is a bit unsteady on his feet. His head is quite bent and gets knock down easily by his siblings. There is nothing wrong with him at all except his head bent but I now feel I should have ended his life as I just don't know how he is going to have the quality of life that he should and am I going to be able care for him?

I now don't know what to do with him? He is doing great but what life is going to have?

 

[ralleia]

After you've fed and watered and worried over him for seven weeks, it's really difficult to "dispatch" the little guy. He will always have a more difficult time of things, and will never have a "normal" chicken life. Ours couldn't even make it onto the bottom roost and instead always slept on the floor of the coop. He couldn't scratch, couldn't chase bugs--it was very sad. We had named him "Quasimodo." He didn't even make it two years.

I just know that if I had one arrive like this again from mail-order I wouldn't hesitate, and I would raise unholy heck with the company that shipped me the bird. If you "process" birds for meat at any point, I'd cull him at the first opportunity.

 

[lemongrass]

My last three chicks to hatch I had to help out of the eggs because they were starting to dehydrate after sitting in just cracked open shells for several hours. One of them looked just like your chick only the neck wasn't as bad. Everytime it tried to eat it would do a somersault, so that's what we called it. 3 weeks later he is doing just fine. The neck fixed itself within a week and now his or her neck is longer than the rest but he's healthy.
I decided I wasn't going to accomodate any sick animals. If he couldn't make it on his own, that was too bad. I believe in natural order, and nature says only the fit survive. I would let him try, though, and he proved he was fit.
I wonder if its a common thing with those types of chicks? What breed is yours? Mine is the same coloring but came from a mix of breeds so I'm not quite sure what it is.

 

[mother o' chicks72]

I think that if the chick acts normally and doesnt seem to be in pain, you should treat it just as you treat the other chicks. If he starts to act worse it might be beneficial to cull it, even though it may be hard.

Just see how he turns out.

 

[Rooster'swife]

Thanks for the response about my poor little chick. I did as y'all suggested and let nature take its course and he died after a couple of days. I did the best to make him comfortable but didn't coddle him. rip little blackie.