Remember the storm we had two weeks ago? Remember this picture?
Yes, the poor girls were SOAKED! Thankfully the rain stopped, the water went down and I was able to get into the pen to clean up within 24 hours of the storm. I noticed that someone was sneezing but of course when I stood there to try and figure out which one I was hearing not a peep was heard out of them. In the days that followed everything went back to normal, and no more sneezes, but I did noticed some pretty horrific wet stools. I checked them all for lice and visible signs of illness and everyone checked out. Two of our girls are on the tail end of molt so they look pretty rough at the best of times. But on Monday I noticed one very nasty looking backside…
YIKES!! This is one of our recent molters – but this doesn’t look like molt to me. I brought her indoors in a pet carrier, and put out a call for help on our Twitter account, and checked with some of the experts in the forums I belong to.
And various suggestions were put forward. One suggested that she may have a strong lice infestation – I checked and didn’t see any. Another suggested she is possibly egg bound, and research online revealed that she did indeed have a lot of the same symptoms, so I went ahead and prepared her a warm epsom salt bath.
She seemed to enjoy that. But when I was drying and cleaning her – KY Jelly at the ready to help free her from the offending egg – I felt around and couldn’t feel any egg block at all. So we scratched that off our list of possible issues. This is when she started wheezing, badly! She really sounded raspy and was breathing with her whole body. She sounded like a purring cat, and appeared to be putting every ounce of energy she had into breathing. A Google search revealed that she may have a respiratory infection, again, the symptoms matched very well.
We made the decision to give her antibiotics. We don’t have a chicken vet any where near us, so this was the best thing we could do for her. Roddy ran out to pick up a bottle of Tylan 50 from TSC and we started her on 1/2cc. (Just a note here: Apparently the dose for a full sized adult chicken is 1/2cc twice daily for 5 days. For bantams it’s 1/4cc)
Within 30 minutes the raspy breathing stopped and appeared to be less labored. She still rarely opened her eyes and instead just lay there in the hay in the pet carrier and slept. After her second dose last night she appeared slightly more alert — SLIGHTLY – and opened her eyes when we would go in to check on her.
She still doesn’t seem to have eaten anything and I am growing concerned about her lack of water intake, but when we gave her her morning dose today she had her eyes open throughout. Promising!
Of course right now she is lying face down in the hay again… so I won’t get my hopes up. We’re doing the best we can to help her fight whatever this is. Let’s hope we can save her.
Her coop mates are all bright and perky and not showing any signs off illness. We’ve boosted their water with a little ACV and added more free choice calcium options. We’ll be working on their coop this weekend trying to figure out a way to avoid this kind of flood in the future.
EDIT: We just went in to check on her and found her no longer breathing. She fought bravely, but unfortunately it was not to be. I am going to have to learn to toughen up – I don’t (yet) take deaths very well. :'(
Have you dealt with illness like this in your own flock? What kinds of medications do you keep on hand for your chickens? Help me to learn from your experience in the comments below.
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