My girls are 10 1/2 months old and doing fabulously. At 18 weeks I took a stool sample from each of them to the vet to check for worms ($25 each!) They were clean. My question is do I need to routinely worm them (like yearly or something?) I donʻt want to give them meds unnecessarily. The guy at the feed store said if I put food grade diamataceous earth in with their feed and in their water that would "worm" them. What do you think?
Don't ever listen to guys at the feed store. More bad info gets spread around by those guys than from any other source. DE is useless as a wormer. In fact, I haven't found that it is particularly useful for any application other than drying up a wet coop and stopping stink. If you want to stay away from chemicals then I would do what you did this year, but on a much smaller cross section of birds. One or 2 birds should be enough to do fecal exams on. Generally if one bird has worms, they all have worms. By testing the birds first you are saving on any unnecessary meds. There are some pretty safe wormers on the market if you choose to follow a worming schedule. A lot of poultry keepers use a scheduled worming program depending on where they live and the prevalence of parasites. I live up North, so I don't worry so much about worms. Someone who lives down in the Southeast has worm problems year round. I am not sure how Oahu is. Good luck.
I thought I didn't need routine worming either, and I wound up with a huge parasite load. Check out the link on my signature line.
As long as they are negative, don't deworm them. I believe your money is MUCH better spent doing fecal exams. If they are negative, no drugs required. They are probably due for another fecal exam. You don't need to test them individually. Just grab a bit of poop from a couple of them and take that in for testing.
