what the heck is wrong with my poult?!

[SilverSage]

I have a mixed breed turkey poult who is 4-6 weeks old. One half of him is swollen up like a toad. It's like someone blew him like a balloon. It feel like air more than water or fluid. He's doing ok, not great, but ok. Could it be a bite of some sort? It's just kinda weird!

Here's a pic of his head. You can see the swelling around his face and chest area.

Here's one of his side. You can't see a whole lot in it, but maybe it'll be helpful. If I hold him up to the light, you can see through the skin on his chest area.

In this one, you can kind of see that his right side (left, looking at the pic) is swollen some.

 

[patandchickens]

Disclaimer: I don't actually know for sure in your particular case.

However, I believe the commonest cause of this in poultry is a ruptured air sac (from getting dropped, or trampled, or beat up by another bird, or from a predator attack). The air leaks from the air sac to under the skin. Reportedly what you should do is nick the skin to deflate the bird and hope it stays that way (I've never had this myself so no personal experience to report... although I've dealt with other livestock wounds that sucked in air from the outside and inflated like that, wounds behind horses' elbows are particularly bad for doing that, and I will say that in those cases the air can be resorbed by the body and heal fine without any intervention. Your poult sure does look *very* inflated though)

There are a couple bacteria that can infect wounds and inflate the skin by gas production but I think you'd know if you had that, the bird would be sick and you'd probably *see* a wound.

So my money is on an air sac rupture. In the absence of other input I'd probably try deflating the skin by puncturing with a sterilized pr of sharp scissors or whatever; but hopefully others will chime in.

Good luck,

Pat

 

[Omniskies]

I had this happen to a six week old Rhode Island Red pullet of mine. Her entire side inflated. Not knowing what else to do, we took a sharp knife and poked it.

She didn't even flinch. It deflated and looked like loose baby skin again. We wiped the area down with alcohol and put her in with the rest. Now you can't tell the difference between her and the others.

If it's the same thing she had then a little poke will fix it. I haven't seen anything return.

 

[SilverSage]

He's a lot more inflated than he looks in the pics. I just couldn't quite get it to show. The air sack thing makes sense, but I don't know how he could have got that sort of trauma. He's in a pen with four smaller barred rock chicks and they are completely enclosed. I 'spose he could have fallen off of something, though.