When I took Fitz in to the vet last week I also took Lou. Lou's been molting forever and seems thin. The other birds are chub-ola and have beautiful feathers, so we figured Lou has something going on that hasn't gotten to the other birds. The vet confirmed that Lou is a bit underweight. She also has a kind of lice that eats her feathers. Sigh. But we got advice and an action plan to get her better. The chickens will get more food scraps from the house. We will also give them molasses, cracked corn and a little calcium citrate powder. Papa Hen and I are also giving the coop a good cleaning every few days and sprinkling some powder into the dirt bath that will help take care of the lice. We'll take Lou back to the vet in a few weeks to check her weight and her feathers.
Here are the four birds on another rainy day.
2 comments:
What is the sprinkling that you will put in their dirt baths to help with lice?? DE?? marsha@tubbslanefarm.com
That's a good question. We are currently evolving on this issue. We had been using DE as recommended by many chicken blogs. But we think that the DE may have contributed to Fitz's respiratory distress. We were then told to use Ortho's Sevin, and are using that in small amounts now, but after further research we believe that it is too dangerous for chickens and humans. So, we are moving to a new dust (as soon as it arrives in the mail) called Ytex Garden and Poultry dust. The active ingredient, permethrin, seems a lot safer than the active ingredients in DE or Sevin.
Have you had experience with any of these?
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