Our babies are sick

Since the moment we were blessed with our girls we have been trying to raise them as natural as possible. We have not medicated them or given them any un-natural products but instead kept them healthy with management of their surroundings and a healthy diet. For six months we beat the odds and had a very healthy, happy flock.

The kids have learned a very important lesson. NEVER allow anyone from outside your farm to go in with your chickens. EVER! We had talked about this before but apparently it is worthy of repeating. If someone comes into the run or hen house who has been where another flock lives, they can carry things on their shoes that you can't see but that can be very dangerous to your birds. This is what we think has happened to our girls. A friend wanted to see the girls so the kids took her in the hen house. She has chickens of her own and within a week our girls were in dire trouble for the first time ever.

Saturday morning Sarah and I went out to let the girls out into their run and turn on the light. We quickly discovered one of our girls had passed in the night. There were no visible signs on her body to explain what had happened. Life had been busy during the week with canning and family activities, so I had not been keeping as close an eye on the bird's stools or spending as much time with them. While we were heartbroken at the loss we had no answer and could not do much unless someone else were to get sick.

Sunday afternoon I noticed one of the girls in the corner of the run by herself. I went to see her and noticed she was very pale and inactive. We immediately pulled her out of the run and checked her over. She had clear eyes and nose, nothing in her craw, but she did show signs of loose poop. Further inspection in the coop showed she had bloody diarrhea. We isolated her into a seperate cage with a heat lamp because she was cold. We straw fed her some sugar water and spent time making sure she was comfortable while we tried to come up with a diagnosis.

All the signs said coccidiosis. The odd part is that our girls are the only chickens, to our knowledge, to be on our soil. At six months of age they should have built an immunity to this problem. Still, the symptoms were there. We went backwards in time to see if anything out of the ordinary had happened that could explain it. The only thing we found was the visitor in the coop. Now, looking for a treatment proved to be a journey. The most common solution for chickens suffering with coccidiosis is Sulmet. There were a couple of problems here. First, this is a sulfur drug which is hard on the digestive tract and would continue the bleeding and the girls are already miserable. Second, Sulmet is not approved for layers. Studies have been done on how long it takes for this medicine to completely leave the meat of the chicken, that would be 10 days, but no studies have been done on the eggs. Chickens are born, like women, with all of the ova they will have and so if the medicine were to damage the ovaries it could affect eggs now or two years from now. If we were to give this to our girls, we could not in good conscience sell the eggs or ever sell the girls as layers without disclosing that they had been on this drug.

Next we researched Amprolium. A product, Corid, has this as a main ingredient but it is marketed for cattle. I called the local co-op to get some words of wisdom and the gentleman was not sure what to tell me but he gave me the number for the state office. I called and they connected me with their veterinarian, who is an amazing person. He said that our only option for layer hens would be the Corid. Since we would be using it off label he gave me the dosage to use for our girls and assured me that it would be totally safe for the girls and their eggs. Apparently it is used commonly in animals for public consumption. When I asked him about what to use to sanitize the coop he explained that chickens are very sensitive to chemicals and their smells and it can give them chemical pneumonia. He recommended a product called Nolvasan and said it is safe to use on everything. For the run, because it is hard to sanitize dirt, his suggestion was to tear up the dirt and allow the sun to disinfect it.

By this time we have realized that all of our girls were under the weather. We made up gallons of sugar water and added the Corid for the girls. We made sure that the ones that seemed further along in the illness were brought to the waterers and dipped their beaks to make sure they started drinking. The first one that we had pulled out, we named her GG for Gloria Gaynor who sang the song "I will survive". That first night we thought she would not make it. After getting some sugar water in her she started drinking on her own around midnight. Still not eating but hanging in there. Yesterday morning we gave her some fresh cucumber, which she ate and slowly started eating some of her layer ration. Once we gave her the water with Corid, she started perking up. Last night she had gotten some of her color back, she was up and about, she knocked her water over and kept hitting the bowl with her foot to get my attention. She was telling me she was ready to go home. While her sisters slept, we snuck her back into the hen house and she joined her flock.

Now we continue the treatment and pray that they all do as well as GG.