Should I be worried if my chook has the runs?

[Nonny]

For the last three days one of my chooks (not sure which one) has left poop smears on her eggs, and this morning when I cleaned out the poop tray this morning I noticed that there were two piles of normal looking poop under the roosts, and one patch that was runny and formless and left a large wet area on the newspaper (the tray is lined with paper).

All three girls seem ok, but we had a lot of rain and humidity recently and when I was doing a cleanup in the run I noticed a patch of mouldy feed where they had chucked it on the ground and it had obviously gone bad. Could eating this have made one of them sick?

Should I be worried or just keep an eye on them and see if any start to look sick?

Is there any way to tell who is doing the runny poop other than to go out there in the middle of the night and see who is roosting in which spot?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Cheers,


Nonny

 

[dawg53]

I strongly urge you to get rid of the moldy feed, shovel it up and dispose it somehow. If your chickens eat moldy feed they can and will become very ill and could possibly die. Here's a link to the poop chart:
http://chat.allotment.org.uk/index.php?topic=17568.0

 

[Nonny]

I got rid of the feed as soon as I found it - it had been there probably a few days though so there's a good chance one of them has had a peck at it. They were all a bit slow to come out of the coop this morning, but are presently doing the morning bug patrol in my yard and seem happy and well.

I checked the poop chart but their poop isn't on it. It's definitely not cecal poop, and if I saw one on the ground I probably would write it off as just a random weird one, but the fact that there's a big pile of it under the roost is what has me worried. If I had to describe it I'd say it looked like a pile of normal poop (brown and white mixed) that had had melted into a lumpy puddle.