fluffy07
Songster
Just a quick tip on trapping red mites. I put 8 bricks in the chicken hut on the newspaper I use to remove faeces below the perches. The red mites gather on the underside of the bricks during the day, when the chickens are outside. I then turn the bricks over, and scrub them with a stiff brush. You can see where they are, in clumps. The problem comes when you have a broody. Sitting all day is like a feast for the mites. The only thing I can do is to take the broody outside, where, hopefully she will have a drink and a pooh, and meantime remove the eggs and clean out the nesting box. Then I return the eggs, and let her return to the nest. You can use Ivermetcin as a spot-on treatment for external parasites but that rather depends on whether you can pick up all your chickens individually, as this needs to be applied under the neck feathers, and it is expensive. So far, after 12 years of chicken keeping, all my birds are healthy and laying and red-combed.
