Carol's Chickens

I am trying to stay positive and deal with the problems in the flock to the best of my ability. Last night was the second time of treating for the scaly mite. I brushed the spray into the scales on the feet and legs of Dot, Salmon and Sugar while my husband held them for me. It’s a two person job.

Star seems to be improving very slowly. I am keeping the steps shallow by moving the soil back towards the steps every few days. Star spends a lot of time sitting but that’s good because she is resting her ankle. She is eating well and pooping, preening and dust bathing.

We are on day four of the double dose of flubenvet. I have managed to get all the girls to take their dose apart from Sugar. I am still breaking her from her broody spell but I think she is nearly through it now. She wouldn’t eat for the first three days of giving the flubenvet but had about half a portion (a single dose) today. Hopefully tonight will be her last night in the broody crate and she should be through it by tomorrow. I will then try to get her to have more flubenvet. She has been sitting in a nest box for the last three weeks so is unlikely to have picked up the gape worm.

Storm and Salmon are easy to dose as once separated they quickly clear their dish of chopped tomato and flubenvet powder. Dot and Gold are more difficult as they don’t like being separated and I have to try to put their dish in front of them when they are away from the other girls. Storm and Salmon would swoop in and take theirs given the chance.

I put a dish in front of Star when she was the only girl on the patio area and she soon cleared her dish. Sugar is the difficult one at the moment.

I am poop picking many times a day at the moment and have found a gape worm both yesterday and today so I hope that means the flubenvet is working and they are being expelled. I still can’t tell which girl has them.

I talked to my eldest son about the situation as he used to keep chickens and he knows how besotted I am with them. He used his favourite phrase “prepare for the worst and hope for the best”. He said that there are things that are out of my control and I can’t magic this away or turn back time so I have to be prepared to lose some or all of the girls and possibly end my chicken keeping. But at the same time he said he knows I will do my very best and that I must make the most of any time I have with the flock now and hope that I can get them through this.

I decided to start by taking a few group photos of the girls having some spinach together.

I constantly research everything I can find on the internet about gape worm. The survival rate isn’t good and I have only found one case so far of someone in America treating one girl and getting her back to normal. It was on the reddit forum and there was no follow up as to whether the flock stayed clear.

I then asked google the question “can gape worm be cured in chickens?” and it said that it could if it was caught early enough. I have to hope that I have, catching it early, on my side this time. The ongoing problem is that once the eggs are in the soil the girls could get infected again in the future.

I will have to keep a good stock of flubenvet at all times and remain forever vigilant from now on. I had no idea that gape worm was so difficult to treat until this happened to us and I started researching it.

Only time will tell how this will go but I am trying to remain positive.

Yesterday my worse fear was realised. While poop picking I found gape worm in some poop. I am putting a photo here despite it being horrible in case it helps someone else to recognise it.

I went through a day of tears and despair. I imagined losing all of our lovely flock one by one. I have researched this so much and talked at length with the vet about it and it is so hard to treat. I had stocked more flubenvet in case but the difficulty is getting each girl to take the amount of powder they need (double normal dose) each day for seven days and then repeat three weeks later.

I can’t believe that Diamond came to our flock with this nasty, and once the eggs are in the soil, they remain for years. This is the worse thing ever for the flock. I thought mico was bad but once I always had tylan in stock at least it’s easy to treat with five days in the water. This is so hard to treat.

Once I had had a protracted panic about this I had to become pro active and do my very best to treat the girls. I had to plan how to get a full measure into each girl. I separated the corner of the run again. I decided to try putting each girl in there one at a time with a dish of favourite things laced with flubenvet powder. I decided to put it in mash as usual as well. I hoped each girl would get at least one dose separately then a top up dose in mash.

Sugar is still broody so I now needed to break her out of it. She has already been broody for three weeks and is showing no sign of coming out of it on her own. I set up the dog crate for her. I closed the nest boxes once the three laying girls had laid. Gold came back into lay recently and has laid for two days in a row after a two week break.

Sugar spent her first night in the broody crate last night and it usually takes three nights to break her out of it. Sugar won’t eat anything while she is desperate to get in to a nest box so as soon as I get her back to normal I will start her on the regime and carry on for however many days longer than the rest that she has missed.

This will be trial and error to see which way I can get the most flubenvet into the girls. I tried Dot separate first because she is the girl who usually hoovers up the treats first. This didn’t work at all for Dot as she was so intent on getting out that she wouldn’t touch the dishes. She just paced the wire and I had to let her out. Instead I put a dish in front of her when she was in a part of the run away from the other girls.

I soon found that they liked chopped tomato better than sunflower hearts so I decided to stick with tomato.

Gold when separated ate half the dish before wanting to come out but ate the other half once out. Salmon and Storm were easiest as they were happy to eat the whole dish while separated. I had already wormed Star with a double dose while she was separated just in case so I am just letting her have the communal dishes of mash for now but will do the same double amount on the repeat.

I am hoping that by catching it early there is more of a chance of coming through this. I think that Diamond was already overloaded when she came to us as none of the girls are showing the symptoms she did.

I dug the run over a couple of weeks ago and tried not to let the girls get any worms but Storm is so fast that she got three. I have seen her shake her head a couple times. I have seen Salmon gape a couple of times but then they all do that sometimes. The smaller the girl the more vulnerable they are but the good thing is that these two girls are the most keen to have the tomato with powder.

I have to stay positive and just treat, treat, treat. I will keep ordering flubenvet when I get half way down a tub and I will keep repeating whenever I think I need to.

In other news the scaly mite spray arrived on Thursday and we started treatment. It’s harder than I thought it would be. I thought it would just need spraying on their legs and feet but not so. It needs to be sprayed on to a soft toothbrush and then applied by stroking upwards into the scales. It needs doing every three days for three weeks.

I bought several soft toothbrushes. On closer inspection Salmon and Sugar have raised scales too but not as bad as Dots. The other girls are smooth. I did all the other girls on the first night with a separate toothbrush as a preventative. Then using a different toothbrush I did Dot, Salmon and Sugar. I will do these three girls every three days for three weeks which I have marked on the calendar. I am doing them at bedtime as it’s easy to lift them from the perch and it stays on all night without them scratching in the run.

I am so worried about all this but all I can do is just keep going. The vet said that there is no handy tip she can give me and flubenvet is the only treatment available in the U.K. Therefore I have to just keep on doing what I am doing and keep everything crossed.

Diamond was only with us for eight months and was only a year and four months old when we lost her. She had never laid an egg. Her breed was supposed to be a prolific egg layer but we never got to find that out.

Diamond was our biggest girl and despite her health problems came in as new top girl and yet was gentle and mild natured with it. Diamond and Dot had a close alliance and were often to be found perching or sitting together.

I don’t have a huge amount of photos as her time with us was short so I have picked one from each month with us and a couple extra.

Once again our flock of six is feeling rather small. Goodbye Diamond. She was a beautiful girl.

Over the last few weeks Diamond had gone down hill. After her double dose treatment with flubenvet to her beak she had passed some gape worms. She was making a snoring sound on her perch at night and I thought that it was probably dead worms clogging her airway and making breathing difficult.

Diamond continued to have a mucky bottom. It was really black and was causing hard lumps to cling to her feathers. I had hoped that I could keep her going for three weeks and then treat her again as recommended.

Then over the last week Diamond spent her afternoons on the branch perch above the ladder. Her bottom was bobbing up and down and her breathing was laboured. She looked really poorly.

Diamond’s beak needing trimming again and once we had done this and put her down she looked like she was about to have a heart attack. She was panting and wobbly. I said to my husband that I thought it was the stress of being handled.

A few days before this I had cleaned her very mucky bottom and I thought she was having a heart attack when I put her down. She was breathing through an open beak and flopping down on one wing then the other. I ran indoors and chopped some tomato in the hope that it would revive her but when I returned to the run she seemed to have recovered.

I dropped tomato in front of her and she ate it. As the days went on Diamond was spending part of the afternoons in the chicken shed. This is never a good sign. For the last two nights Diamond didn’t go to her low perch but sat on the floor in the pine shavings.

This was just a couple of days before Diamond was due to be treated again which was why we had trimmed her beak to make it easier and I had cleaned her bottom so that I could monitor her once starting treatment.

I knew in my heart of hearts that it was unlikely Diamond was going to get better. I continued to read other peoples experiences on the reddit forum. People that had tried to treat for gape worm said there was a very low survival rate.

Seeing how badly Diamond was being effected by us handling her I decided that it would be too hard on her to pick her up and put flubenvet in her beak for seven days especially when I was beginning to feel that it wasn’t going to work anyway.

I called the vet and made an appointment to take Diamond in. Once in the cat box Diamond was very stressed. She was again breathing through an open beak and flapping. It was very stressful. The vet saw me straight away and said that Diamond was having heart failure. I have been here before with Sienna. The vet put Diamond to sleep and once again I was crying. I feel heart sick and I am terrified of any of the other girls getting gape worm. I just hope we won’t be that unlucky.

We have only had Diamond for eight months and she has had problems in all of that time. She was a year and four months old and had never laid an egg.

I feel so sad for her. I have grown really fond of our special needs chicken and I have tried so hard to get her through this. I should probably have let her go earlier but it is always so hard to give up.

I feel as if we go through one thing after another and my blog has become really sad lately. It’s almost enough to make me give up and yet I love chickens so much. We will stay at six for the near future. It makes me worry about having girls in future and yet if you don’t add new girls the flock will gradually die out. We seem to have had a run of bad luck lately.

The thing that truly terrifies me is the possibility of any of the other girls picking up gape worm. I am scared of losing them one by one. This is the worse thing that we have had to deal with so far because it is so hard to treat.

I will do a tribute for Diamond tomorrow. Her time with us was short but she was such a lovely girl despite all her problems.

Sometimes I feel that no matter how hard I try to keep our girls healthy there is always another problem round the corner. I wonder if, as long time chicken keepers, we will experience every chicken problem eventually. It’s been fourteen years of chicken keeping for me and now another new problem has cropped up.

I recently noticed that Dot’s feet were looking gnarly. I immediately thought of scaly mite and started researching it. It does indeed look as if Dot has scaly mite. I asked where it comes from and found that it can come from wild birds, rodents or it can live in the soil in the run. We do have mice coming in during the winter months and they can get through the weld mesh so there is no way to stop them.

Chickens’ scales on their legs and feet should be smooth and flat. If they have scaly mite the scales lift and look rough and white.

The scaly mite burrows under the scales and it is highly contagious so the whole flock needs treating. I looked for the best treatment and ordered Net Tex spray solution. It soothes, softens and cleanses the scales and suffocates the scaly mites. It provides a protective coating and prevents further infection.

Scaly mite have a life cycle of ten to fourteen days so the treatment needs to be done every five days for up to three weeks to break the egg cycle.

Scaly mite will not go away without treatment and eventually will cause damage to the feet and possible lameness. When the treatment is complete the chicken shed will need cleaning and disinfecting to get rid of any eggs.

Some people use vaseline or petroleum jelly to smother the scales and suffocate the mites. My research says its messy and not sure to get rid of them all so the spray is the best method. I will lift the girls from the perch at bedtime and spray them. This will make it easy to do them all and it will allow the spray to stay put over night.

I will keep spraying Dot until she is completely back to normal. It does say that it’s easy to treat so I am hopeful that I can get on top of this.

Yesterday I opened up the separated part of the run and let Star rejoin the flock. The first thing she did was to go to the food dishes. She is definitely moving much better and she looked really happy to be back with the flock.

Star has also managed the steps with ease. At bedtime she was back on her own wider perch in the corner of the chicken shed.

I have continued to put a dish of mash just inside the wooden shelter for now so that Star doesn’t have to compete for food. She has joined in with the flock for spinach and apple without any problem.

I took the opportunity to worm Star while she was separated and found no worms so that’s good too.

I am very happy with how Star is doing and think she is going to be okay. Star looks happy to be back with the flock.

Star will be separate for one more day. She wants to come out but has one more day of flubenvet for worming and metacam for pain relief. After the first few days I switched to adding her metacam to sunflower hearts instead of syringing to her beak. This is less stressful for her as she didn’t like being picked up.

Star is still limping but it’s much less pronounced and she looks brighter in herself so I think she is healing. She is eating, pooping, preening and dust bathing which are all good signs.

Meanwhile I have re done the steps to make them safer. It’s a bit “after the horse has bolted” but “better late than never”. The steps had evolved over time. I started with one block pointing out into the run and then as the soil gradually dropped I added a second block. The first one had set as if in concrete over time which is why I hadn’t moved it before now.

I spent time chipping out the baked soil and removing any stones. I moved soil up towards the chickens’ patio and then dug the blocks in. I sloped them very slightly backwards, the first up against the patio and the second up against the first, so that they are stable.

The steps are now stable, level and shallow. And yes, Gold is now broody too. She went broody a few days ago after laying twenty four eggs in six weeks. We seem doomed to only have a couple of girls laying.

I am going to give Diamond her next beak trim and bottom wash. She is due her repeat round of the double dose of flubenvet in nine days time. I really hope she will then be clear of gape worm for good but only time will tell.

Dot usually lays her egg in a corner of the chicken shed and it’s always the same corner. But while Sugar is broody Dot is very interested in her nest box. Dot sometimes joins Sugar in her nest box despite Sugar raising her tail and growling at her.

Yesterday Dot settled in the nest box with Sugar. Later when I checked on them Dot was back in the run. I lifted Sugar and there was Dot’s eggs under her. Sugar must have been pleased to have an egg to sit on for a little while.

They are such funny girls that you can’t help but smile at them.

Star has such long toes that she sometimes stands on her own toes and is quite clumsy. Nearly a week ago while I was sweeping the chickens’ patio I happened to see her stumble off the edge of the wooden blocks that make the steps from the patio area to the run.

The following day I noticed that Star was limping. I picked Star up and inspected her feet and legs and couldn’t see anything amiss.

It seemed to have knocked her confidence as she wouldn’t compete with the other girls at the food dishes so I put a feeding station just inside the wooden shelter like when she first came to us.

I hoped that Star would get better on her own but over the following days her limp became more pronounced and she was spending a lot of her time sitting down. I decided to separate Star into the corner of the run that Diamond had been in. This would mean that she wouldn’t have to compete for food and she wouldn’t have to get up the steps to the patio area which was a struggle for her.

I phoned the vet and the earliest appointment they had was for this afternoon.

I also decided that while Star was separate I would worm her as I realised that I had wormed the girls just before she came in. While separate it would be easy to put the powder in her mash or in a dish with some sunflower hearts.

Meanwhile Diamond has a mucky bottom once more and sometimes makes a slight snoring sound. I am hoping that it is because dead worms are blocking her up a bit rather than live worms. I have found gape worms in her poop and on the patio area so I think she is coughing them up and pooping them out. I am cleaning up umpteen times a day to try to keep it as clean as possible. I decided to take the opportunity to talk to the vet about the whole gape worm situation while I was there.

At the vets we put Star on the floor so that the vet could see her limp. I then held Star while the vet gave her legs a feel all over. She concluded that it was her ankle that was causing her pain. She said that Star had torn her ligament. There is nothing that can be done to help fix it and it should get better on it’s own but will take time. She gave me some metacam for pain relief. It is a honey flavoured mixture that we can syringe to her beak.

The vet said that it would be best for Star to stay as inactive as possible. When I told her she was separated and the space was small and flat she said that was perfect.

In between I had run the vet through the whole situation with Diamond. She said that I was doing all the right things and she had no tips or advice to add. I said that when I realised after six months and lots of worming that Diamond still had gape worm I had considered having her put to sleep for the safety of the flock but decided that as gape worm had been amongst the flock for six months that I would have another go at trying to rid her of them.

I said that if I can’t get Diamond clear of gape worm after the next worming I may have to consider having her put to sleep because I can’t keep on worming so heavily on an ongoing basis. The vet absolutely agreed that I was right. She said difficult decisions have to be made for the good of the flock and Diamond herself and they would be totally on board with that.

I said it scares me that the other girls could get it and that I had read the eggs can stay in the soil for three or four years. I am paranoid if I see a girl eat a worm because worms eat the eggs and pass them on. She said that unfortunately you can’t disinfect soil. I said that I am cleaning the run all the time and she said there isn’t anything else I can do.

It was good to know that the vet thought I was doing everything right and as she said doing all that I can. Hopefully Star will start to feel better soon and will gradually heal. This is the first time in all of my chicken keeping time that I have had a girl have an injury.

With Diamond only time will tell. I hope I can get her through this but I also know that I have to be realistic. I can only do my best.

Yesterday Diamond had her seventh day of a double dose of flubenvet in water syringed to her beak. Since she has been separated she has eaten just enough to keep her going so we had to keep giving it to her this way to make sure she was getting a full dose. During this time I have found gape worms in her poop. I hope that by giving her this bigger dose we can rid her of them. We will repeat in three weeks as recommended to break the cycle. We don’t want to take any chances of not eliminating them this time round.

Meanwhile Sugar has gone broody already. She has laid seven eggs in fourteen days. We seem destined to only have three girls laying. Storm resumed laying just as Sugar stopped. Luckily three girls laying gives us enough eggs to keep us going.

In view of all the egg laying problems we have had in the past I have decided that for now I will just leave her to it. I may try to break her out of it if she goes on too long but will see how it goes. Sugar is the most committed broody we have ever had so time will tell.

Diamond has settled back happily with the flock. She is now eating pellets again and went straight to her own perch in the chicken shed last night. A few days ago I cleaned her bottom again.

I will be repeating the worming process again in three weeks time but I will now know that if she has a mucky bottom again it is probably a sign that she still has worms. I really hope we can get rid of them this time around as I don’t know where else we can go from here otherwise. I am keeping everything crossed.