Please help! Scaly leg mite?

[Sahara]

We just brought in a pair of Buff Orpingtons from a friends coop and the hen has scaley leg mites bad. We put vaseline on her yesterday and I also read somewhere else that you could use vegetable oil on the legs and also put some on their roost once a month to deter another outbreak.

 

[LocoPollo]

How many applications of vaseline does it take to get rid of it? All of my game birds have it bad.

 

[mypicklebird]

Certain breed and even certain individuals seem to be more predisposed to getting scaly leg mites. It is contagious, but takes months or years to look really bad. It came from another chicken or a wild bird coming into the yard. They live between the scales, and not out in the dirt or coop. Pretty direct contact is needed to transmit it. Any method to smother the mites will work to decrease them, and contain them. Giving something systemic like ivermectin will kill them more effectively, you need to treat more than once (twice, 2 weeks apart- mite eggs are resistant). Treat everybody with the thing you select to do, not just the ones that look bad. ALL the chickens have been exposed, and they will keep passing it around.

Keep in mind that ivermectin has NO published withdrawal time for eggs., as well as it works, legally- the withdrawal time is LIFE. What this means is you should never sell the eggs or give them to someone without telling them. What it means in practice of backyard pet chicken keeping (keeping birds for pets or for your home grown eggs), is generally not eating the eggs for a couple of weeks. From ripening of yolk to a shelled egg is about 2 weeks. All of the yolk follicles a hen has are there when she hatches, so conceivably a systemic drug could get into every one of them- but not very much. Just food for thought.