roost diarrhea (with photos) - what to do?

[cityeggs]

This morning before food & water, her crop still felt hard, which confuses me (and everyone else's was normal). It makes me wonder whether I got confused while massaging it/feeling it yesterday, but while I'm still pretty new at this, I do know how to find their crops, so I don't know how I could mistake it for something else.

The dropping board showed slightly more fecal matter under her than the previous few days, so it seems she was able to get a little bit more food, perhaps when things loosened up a bit? which is encouraging, but still lots and lots of water.

 

[azygous]

If her crop was full and hard, try more oil. You can give oil at a rate of two teaspoons every hour with massage. If you cannot feel the content break up after several tries, add a stool softener, wait an hour and do more massage.

 

[cityeggs]

Is it unusual for it to break up one day but become hard again the next day? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what I read, but the other posts made it sound like it can be slow to clear - like getting a little better every day for a few days, but once the impaction clears, it wouldn't immediately be impacted again the next day - is that wrong?

 

[azygous]

One size does not fit all, as the ad says. No single treatment is guaranteed to work for every individual chicken, as azygous says.

We haven't run out of tricks to clear a stubborn crop, either. So, be positive. We'll lick this one way or another.

Continue with the oil and massage for today. Add the stool softener to the treatment if a few more oil and massages fail.

Keep updating with reports on behavior, poop, and crop assessments. If the crop hasn't improved by morning, we'll talk about other options which include flushes and surgery as a final drastic hailmary.

 

[cityeggs]

Ugh - wrote a reply and my browser crashed before I could post it!

Treated her this afternoon - couldn't get to it this morning, but tomorrow I will in the AM. I didn't check her crop before giving her coconut oil, and I wish I had, bc when I checked post-coconut oil, it seemed empty and soft, so I'm not sure whether it was already like that or if that was due to the coconut oil minus massage.

Gave her the charcoal powder (out of the capsule) mixed in with mash and coconut oil, left her for an hour alone with only that as food in the coop with water, most of the coconut oil chunks were gone, but most of the black mash was still there.

Even after that hour, I couldn't see any fresh poop from her anywhere; slight chance she buried it with some digging/scratching, but same thing happened yesterday. I'm keeping an eye out for black poop, which helps at least!

Located some Corid and can probably get dewormer at the same feed store, but I asked for the wrong thing - forgot we can use equine etc. dewormers at calculated dosages instead.

I'm not very experienced checking weight by keel bone even with pictures, but she seems much thinner than the other two so I think she's been worse off than I realized for a while

 

[azygous]

Good. That's a tall order you were given. Good you got her started on some of the treatment.

Activated charcoal, to be effective must be given in amounts that exceed whatever toxin you suspect has been ingested. Because of this, it's better to just pop the charcoal capsules directly into her beak. (Don't worry, chickens can swallow big pills way easier than you can.) That way, you know she has gotten the amount of charcoal she requires.

Most medication requires precise dosage, and the doses should not be diluted in food or water unless the directions say to administer it that way, such as Corid.

Lots of things can cause weight loss. Infection, crop issues, cancer, recovering from molt. A few of my chickens molt so intensely, they actually shrink in size from loss of appetite. Once or twice I even have had to tube feed a chicken that had become too weak from lack of appetite she lost the will to eat.

 

[cityeggs]

Thanks! I really hope I don't have to get to the tube feeding stage with her! She still has some appetite, thankfully. I did manage to get her to eat more of the black mash before bedtime tonight (still no visible poop, though it was late evening, so I might've missed it!), but it was definitely not the full amount of charcoal. I was hoping she'd eat enough - she loves mash and I didn't give her that much bc she doesn't have her usual appetite, but I think she was put off by the black color. I will try to get a helper tomorrow to get it in her beak directly. In my first draft , I explained why I went the food route: I am not very adept at giving medication directly yet - I have only successfully gotten a capsule/tablet in a beak once, and it took more than 30 minutes, and it was into a much more cooperative hen. I can only imagine the fun we're going to have trying to dose them all properly with dewormer.

 

[azygous]

It tricky getting a pill into any animal, and chickens are a challenge because they can exhibit more strength than we expect them to have. Also, chickens manipulate us into believing they are very fragile creatures, so we are sometimes fearful of hurting them in trying to treat them when they are sick or injured. It's mostly a myth that we will harm them prying open a beak.

First thing you need to remember to do when you need to handle a chicken for most any reason and you expect them to be uncooperative is to employ a bath towel to wrap them up securely. This confines wings and feet that won't hurt them, but sure can do damage to their human. This enables you to hold the chicken with the help of the wrapped towel controlling the chicken. It's the biggest helper a single person has when treating their chicken.

If I have a chicken who really hates me and fights like a tiger to get away, I wrap an ACE elastic bandage around the towel making it certain the chicken can't get free until I'm finished with them.

I use the fingers of both hands to pry open the beak, because beaks are strong like alligator jaws when a chicken has a mind to keep it closed. I use a finger nail to get the beak unsealed, then I slip a finger of my weak hand into the beak to keep it from closing again. It's darned convenient chickens don't have teeth. Then I grab the pill with the strong hand and use the weak hand to pry the beak open fully. Then I shove the pill in and close the beak. This automatically causes the pill to slide down into the crop. Slick and super easy.

 

[cityeggs]

That's really helpful! I managed to get both charcoal pills down her with minimal effort this morning without an additional person - the towel helped a lot. It's really the part you mentioned about worrying that I will hurt her that I get stuck on. She's got a malformed beak (a slight cross-beak with a little hump in it, and one naris that's more closed than normal too), so the prying open is relatively easy, thankfully.

I think she's improving. This morning, there was much more solid and less water on the dropping board under her spot - a few actually normal looking droppings, but I could tell they were hers bc they were dark gray from the charcoal. She still had a hard crop this AM, so I gave her more coconut oil, and she eats it readily, so I didn't have to pop it in her mouth. I left her for about 10-15 min to eat it, and her crop was soft without massage when I checked again. She's alone in my hoop tractor thing inside the foraging area within view of the others, and she seemed to be more energetic than yesterday - she was digging a lot, and even flew up on the blue barrel (before I separated her), which I'd never seen her do before - I think she's lost enough weight that she can get up there, but at least had the energy to do so. I hadn't really realized how subdued she'd become recently - it had been a slow process, with lots to distract me in the last 2 wks.

While I hung out, she had a few small solid poops, which also seems to be an improvement over yesterday, and wasn't guzzling water after the coconut oil either - more normal. I'm keeping her separate for an hour or two, mostly so I can monitor her intake/output better.

I did find 3 small allium shoots, one of which had been bitten off, so I will have to keep a closer eye. I think they'd leave them alone if there was any other tasty green to be had in the run, but nothing else grows there, of course - just the bulbs that can survive under all those wood chips and constant digging.

 

[azygous]

What species of allium is are those shoots? Onion are bad for chickens while chives are good for them.

I'm pleased with her progress, as I'm sure you are!