What did you do with your flock today?

[Gammas Bearded Babies]

They got back even faster than last time! Nohope is dying…and we still have no idea why! @Shetland lover
View attachment 3408203

Oh I'm so sorry Kurby! I just knew this was gonna point you a direction to help him get back on his feet!

 

[Gammas Bearded Babies]

72...3, 4, 5 76 alerts on my phone from the rat. It only took the 11 o'clock hour off lolView attachment 3407963
@Gammas Bearded Babies I set the camera up inside the coop so it is nice and close but I do think Blink give me a pretty good picture. Obviously need to move or adjust to actually get the boys in the frame. Did not want to be to intrusive and not a lot of options up there. Need to go check on their water, hang their feeder and move camera today.
Our wild weather has made it to Kauai. Should be fun.

This is a pic of my camera at night...unless the dang rat jumped up doing cartwheels I couldn't see a Thang!

 

[ChicksnMore]

They got back even faster than last time! Nohope is dying…and we still have no idea why! @Shetland lover
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I was so hoping one of the tests would give a positive and that'd help. Wish I had any ideas. I'll keep my fingers crossed that somehow NoHope will be ok.

Yeah the water never comes out of the swamp....it is extremely deep and filters below our property through a tunnel of sorts. So our yard just goes over to the edge which is raised higher by about 15' or so...and the entire swamp has all kinds of overgrown weeds that have literally become trees...2.story tall blackberry vines, great vines and poison ivy and all the allergic stuff galore intertwined all in the trees!
There literally is only 1 tree worth keeping...a red bud!
We got an estimate for 2 trees to be cut down and the vines cut down out of the trees around the edge there to the left of our fence in pic and they said $3500 per day!
So that aint happenin! Lol
So the guy we had push it all back away from the fence is where we need to figure out what to put down to keep the vines and weeds from returning into trees again so quickly.

No clue but I can tell you the entire neighborhood knows once it has rained! Even with 20° today they were still going crazy from the massive rains and storms yesterday when it was 70°
They won't let us clear it off...we can only "touch" the edges around it to these posts.

It sounds both a blessing and a curse. Are you able to pick the blackberries? The thought of two story plants has me drooling...lol.

Well...how about rocks? They can really keep weeds down all by themselves. If your lucky enough to have a good source for them.

Goats could be a fun way to try to keep the growth in check too

 

[Shetland lover]

I have this: View attachment 3408082
It's saved several hatches now. It'll run both incubators for something like 6 hours. It plugs into the wall and the incubators plug into it. It charges and kicks in automatically so super easy to use. We get a lot of power outs here but most are brief... we've had a few last an hour or more though in the years we've had it.

That rats having way too much fun in there

O that's funny! Mine have caught mice before but I've never seen them stalk... maybe I'll get lucky someday and catch them at it.

First time I've ever seen it too! I'd no idea they did it either. Gladys and Clara regularly catch mice and I have seen Gladys drop off a branch on top of a mouse. She had hold of it in her talons like she was a bird of prey. What Penelope was doing was on a whole other level!

 

[Gammas Bearded Babies]

It sounds both a blessing and a curse. Are you able to pick the blackberries? The thought of two story plants has me drooling...lol.

Well...how about rocks? They can really keep weeds down all by themselves. If your lucky enough to have a good source for them.

Goats could be a fun way to try to keep the growth in check too

It definitely is...cuz I am soooo allergic to majority of the stuff over even near where they were I hadn't picked in last few years.
Walkin on the road I must have gotten a drip underneath the tree limbs from something and was broke out for over a month in my hair scalp neck last spring. It was miserable!
No inexpensive way for rocks.
And I'm already illegal with all my babies behind the house...goats would definitely get me arrested lol!
You have amazing ideas - it's just really a limited amount of things we can do or pay for at this point.

 

[FBMcrazy8]

Looks like a bit of a dreary wintery day there! So neat you saw all those geese! I can tell I have been scarred by all the illnesses in my flock lately--instead of enjoying the pictures I cringed at all the germs they might carry! Sometimes not knowing so much is just better haha.

Your brooder set up looks great!! I hope you get at least 2 to hatch! They get so lonely when only one survives!

Yeah…the thought did cross my mind. They didn’t come too terribly close luckily but close enough that when they moved away from the property shortly after I took the pictures I did breath a sigh of relief.

 

[FBMcrazy8]

Had a long power outage during the night. My incubators are hooked up to a battery backup so they were just fine, but the brooders weren't. Woke up to find one chick passed during the night. My backup has more outlets, so thinking about how to move things around so my brooders are near to the incubators and can share the backup battery. Poor little tykes must have been cold.
Windy windy day here. I can hear it howling around outside!

I’m so sorry you lost one! I hope that you can find a solution! Better yet I really hope you don’t have any more power outages.

 

[Shetland lover]

They got back even faster than last time! Nohope is dying…and we still have no idea why! @Shetland lover
View attachment 3408203

You said all the affected birds came from the same coop? What were the symptoms for each of them? I'm looking for possible common denominators. For example, is the soil contaminated with lead, zinc or some other heavy metal? If the drainage is poor, are we looking at proliferative bacteria in the soil e.g. staph, strep or e.coli or a virus which is causing disease?

I think we need to go right back to the beginning with Nohope.
How old is he?
When did he start showing signs of illness?
What were his original symptoms? What are they now? How have they changed and when did they change?
Are his symptoms the same as any of the other birds you've lost?
What medications have you treated him with and did any of his symptoms improve after treatment?
Has he had any vaccinations?

Sorry for all the questions but the more information the better. Of course, you don't need to tell me if you think I'm being too nosey or overstepping.
It's heart breaking not knowing what's wrong. You must be feeling so sad, frustrated and angry.

I came upon this paper on cutaneous Mareks affecting domestic flocks in the Rostov region of Russia:

https://knepublishing.com/index.php/KnE-Life/article/view/8996/15296

Does this sound a little bit like Ms Pretty's 'fowl pox?

"On the skin, in 30% of cases, epithelial hyperplasia was found on the feather follicles in the form of whitish nodules (Figure 5 a). Feather follicles often fused together, taking the form of brown scabs. Scabby, dense, irregularly shaped skin growths occurred in 23.3% of chickens"

I found the paper was interesting in that it highlighted just how differently Mareks disease can manifest in the same flock.

 

[FBMcrazy8]

They got back even faster than last time! Nohope is dying…and we still have no idea why! @Shetland lover
View attachment 3408203

I’m so sorry!! I was really hoping you would have answers!

 

[ducklady911]

Any of you people use Kalmbach feed? What feed do you folks use?

Just switched to Kalmbach. Love it, birds do too. I switched over because of people talking about Purina and TSC feed causing them not to get eggs. I don't what to believe about that. There are do many opinions from Government conspiracy to inflation causing cheap fillers to be added. All I know is I am very impressed with kalmbach and choose it over Purina, Dumor and Producers Pride. I know yhst sll the feed O got from TSC was full of dust. There was very little dust in Kalmbach feed and vit was shipped to me.

It smells amazing. I am feeding their omega crumbles yo hens, yheir duck pellets to geesexand ducks. I like that the pellets are smaller.

Also using their scratch grain.