Carol's Chickens

I love seeing the girls dust bathing together. Storm often seems to be the helper. She was going between Gold and Dot and pecking around them. She had a film of dust on her back so had obviously already had her turn.

Dust bathing girls are happy girls and it always makes me smile to see them dust bathing together.

We really enjoyed the coronation weekend. We watched the whole thing on television on Saturday with wine and nibbles. We felt proud to witness such a historical event and thought the whole thing was spectacular.

On Sunday we were invited to afternoon tea and drinks with our allotment friends plus the neighbours opposite us. We had such a good get together. We watched the Windsor concert together and ended up getting back home in the early hours of the morning.

Bank holiday Monday I decided to give the girls a fish treat. I like to include them and it’s good to see them looking so good.

It’s been such a lovely weekend and it’s good to see the girls looking happy too.

I know for certain that Diamond had gape worm. Her symptoms were a mucky bottom, a coughing sound, difficulty breathing, gaping, neck stretching and head shaking. She also improved with flubenvet and coughed up gape worm on the chickens’ patio. They looked like tiny red threads. Eventually they overwhelmed her and I couldn’t get her free of them.

The rest of the flock had no symptoms but I found what I thought was gape worm in some poop. However after we found Star dead overnight I started looking up chicken poop. I am afraid that I have to admit that I research chicken stuff every day and I do on occasion research chicken poop. Star had been producing some lemon yellow poops in the days before her demise and I wondered if it could be an indication of a heart problem.

Anyway while looking at all the variations of chicken poop I came across a photo very similar to the one I took of what I thought was gape worm. The article said that the lady found it on the overnight poop board and as she was taking her dog to the vets that day she took it with her to get it tested for worms. It turned out there were no worms. Sometimes chickens shed part of the intestinal lining.

I had thought it was rather big and odd that it would be expelled while the girls were showing no symptoms but I went into panic mode. Ironically this was on the day that I had just finished worming the girls with a double dose of flubenvet.

I am now hoping that this means that the flock will be okay. They all look great. A friend who I discussed this with a few days ago pointed out that Diamond had been with us eight months and in that time the rest of the flock hadn’t shown any symptoms so it was possible that they wouldn’t pick it up or if they had and I cleared them they may not pick it up again. This was before I saw the article and photo above.

I am now feeling much happier about the flock. I am trying to build up their health so have put some vitamins in their water and given them some plain mash. I also gave them a tray of cabbage seedlings. My husband has been planting trays of seeds for the allotment and having potted on twenty cabbage seedlings the rest were surplus.

Perhaps at last we can settle back to normality for a while. At least until the next drama hits us.

Star had such a short time with us of only two months and she was only six months old. Once again caring for a problem girl had made me very fond of her. Since she tore the ligament in her ankle I had always made sure that she was eating enough. I also made sure the steps from the chickens’ patio remained shallow.

I now wish I had taken more photos of her recently but of course I thought I had plenty of time. Her comb had grown since we first we had her and her feathers looked pristine.

She was with us for such a short time but she was a lovely girl and will be missed. Goodbye Star.

This morning we went up to the chicken run and were surprised not to see Star in the run. I checked the chicken shed and Star was dead on the chicken shed floor.

We were totally shocked. Star’s limp had been improving and yesterday she looked the best she has ever looked. For the first time since we have had her she was perched on the third rung of the ladder next to Dot. How I wish I had taken a photograph. Later in the afternoon she was on top of the wooden shelter for the first time since she hurt her ankle. I lifted her down as I was worried that if she jumped down she would set her ankle back.

My husband says it must have been her last hurrah! She was eating well and pooping. My husband has pointed out that she was sitting down a lot but I had put that down to her bad ankle. When we did the scaly mite treatment at bedtime last night Star was on her usual perch and looked fine.

I have taken a photo because I am almost feeling that I won’t be believed. I am still reeling from the shock myself.

Star was only six months and should have been due to start laying soon. We have only had her for two months. I am beginning to think that the chicken gods won’t allow me to have new chickens! We have now lost all our new girls.

I am certain Star didn’t have worms because I had doubled dosed her with flubenvet when she was separated because of her ankle. There was no sign of any worms of any sort. Her poops are bigger than the other girls so fairly easy to tell and I have never found any worms in them.

I have been terrified of losing the girls one by one due to worms but not so much Star. Ironically yesterday I thought that I might end up with just Star remaining. Having chosen hardy breeds and breeds that should be good egg layers it turned out that neither Diamond or Star ever got to lay an egg. I am now feeling that I should have just stuck with having seramas after all.

I couldn’t leave this post with just that photo so I took a couple of photos of the remaining girls together.

I have now finished worming the girls. I still can’t believe that Star has gone and I will do a tribute to her short time with us tomorrow. I only hope that I can keep these five girls and have some normality in the flock.

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.