Weak gosling

[Joduck]

We have some young goslings, we bought them, so we don't know the age, but fairly young. We bought 2 at the same time, 1 is healthy and strong growing well and eating well, the other has just started to look weak, small and a bit sickly. We haven't seen it eat last night or this morning, but it is still drinking. There are no other symptoms and the rest of the babies look just fine (we have them in with our ducklings). It's plenty warm, there is plenty of food and water.
What could be wrong and how can we help? There are no avian vets round here and if we tried to ask a vet they would look at us like we were bonkers and expect us to either let nature take its course or cull it and we of course don't want to do that.
Any help or advice would be very much appreciated, thank you.

 

[FoodFreedomNow]

Do you have a supplement like Poultry Nutri-Drench handy? If so, I'd start offering some in water to the gosling - it's a good source of quick energy and may help perk him/her up.

What are you feeding the goslings? If it's not a waterfowl-specific feed, they'll need additional niacin. This site has more information about dosing, etc. I prefer nutritional yeast to brewer's yeast for waterfowl.

Best wishes for your gosling's recovery!

 

[Joduck]

Do you have a supplement like Poultry Nutri-Drench handy? If so, I'd start offering some in water to the gosling - it's a good source of quick energy and may help perk him/her up.

What are you feeding the goslings? If it's not a waterfowl-specific feed, they'll need additional niacin. This site has more information about dosing, etc. I prefer nutritional yeast to brewer's yeast for waterfowl.

Best wishes for your gosling's recovery!

We are feeding waterfowl specific starter feed. We are giving peas and fresh greens and they forrage on plenty of foods. I can look at supplementing brewers yeast too. The feed stores and pet shops looked at us like we were crazy when we asked for a vitamin supplement, so it's safe to say nothing like that is available locally. I've seen it on the Internet.
But we may have found the issue... They share a space with our ducklings and some of the ducklings are getting ready to move on, while the others are quite young we think one of the older ducks - the probable male is picking on it. So we have seperated them and gradually little goosey is eating. We have given some sugar water to try and give a bit of a boost and we will keep a close eye on it.
Thank you for the advice

 

[FoodFreedomNow]

YVW...and please keep us posted.

 

[Joduck]

Well little one is still with us and eating more and more every day and looking stronger every day too. We have moved their pen to somewhere greener and it is happier and we have been letting them out to graze as it certainly has a preference for foraged food over our baby food.

 

[Miss Lydia]

Nutritional yeast has much more niacin in it than brewers yeast.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/nutritional-yeast-vs-brewers-yeast.1393856/

More good reading
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/niacin-deficiency-in-waterfowl.1367557/