Dropped eggs at night

[chrismahon]

Thought it worth sharing this experience. We have on occasion had eggs dropped from the hens roosting on the perches at night. There are several reasons for this that we were previously aware of:-
Fright- a predator or unusual disturbance.
Stress- overcrowding leading to fighting for perch space or overheating in the coop from lack of ventilation or just highly strung pullets.
Red mite or lice preventing them from settling.
Genetic fault in the egg laying function.

But we had a new reason this week after finding a broken egg in the coop 4 mornings in a row. The final morning one sorry looking bantam Leghorn hen (Lily) was standing in the coop head and tail down looking very sorry for herself. Behind her was a poo, the likes of which I had never seen before. Mainly clear fluid but in it were large chunks of what looked like shed intestinal lining and roundworms. Up to that point all poos in that coop were completely normal.

We took her in and administered a 'shot' of Flubenvet, which we create by adding 15mL of Olive oil to a scoop of 2.5% Flubenvet powder and mixing thoroughly. For a bantam its 0.25mL of the mixture and large fowl 0.5mL. Within 5 hours she was back to normal and laid in the nest box the next day. Whilst we routinely worm all our chickens with 7 days of shots it's not a process I would recommend as it is very easy for the bird to breath the mixture rather than swallow and so choke, but for a sickie who isn't eating it is the only way to treat worms. The alternative is vet treatment of course.

Worth adding that all our chickens are Pedigrees. Hybrids that we have had in the past repeatedly dropped eggs at night when they came to the end of their laying life.

 

[rick]

The idea of a 'shot' of Flubenvet is very interesting Chris. I realise you are talking about an emergency situation here and not a general treatment.
just to get it right - was that a standard 6g scoop? And then the 15ml becomes 'stock' from which you take the 0.25 or 0.5ml to administer? Presumably as soon as they are eating it is back to the normal medicated food for the rest of the 7 days?

I love my industry hybrid girls but am just coming to the realisation of how trouble prone they are when they get older and the dilemmas that raises.

 

[chrismahon]

Yes Rick, the 6g scoop, but 2.5% Flubenvet not the standard 1%. If you use the 1% the shots are rather large and the risk of choking much higher. We give all of ours 7 shots in a course. It's a two person job and has to be done very carefully, but it's better than mixing pellets for 30 birds and confining them to runs that are really too small we have found. It means their runs in the morning and free range in the afternoon routine remains unchanged and we are also able to check them over.

 

[dinosaw]

That's an interesting response by your Leghorn Chris. You would have expected her to get worse before she got better as the worms died within her, just goes to show.

 

[Marigold]

What had happened to your worming programme, Chris? I was surprised that one of your birds was so badly affected. I'm glad the treatment worked, but I'm sure you'll agree, it's best if possible to keep things under control by worming in the normal way, with the chickens confined over a week, Flubenvet in the feed, and nothing else given. As you say, it's not to be recommended except in extremity, and given by an expert such as yourself as its a dangerous procedure.

 

[chrismahon]

I'm afraid our worming programme suffers because of interruption with trips to the UK Marigold -or at least it did, because the house is sold! The weather doesn't help either. What we have been doing is giving an intermediate treatment with Verm-X on bread and that seems very effective, alternated with Flubenvet. In fact it is a far better treatment than Flubenvet for those strange red worms we had last year.

We've treated two of our neighbour's free ranging (completely free so no fences) Black Gasconnes with 'shot' administered worming. They were both in a very sorry state and recovered overnight. This got us thinking about the purpose of 7 days treatment. If the worming is so effective first day surely a follow up on the 7th day will kill any eggs hatched in the meantime? So we are going to experiment with treatment day one and two, then day 7 and see how we get on.

 

[rick]

We've treated two of our neighbour's free ranging (completely free so no fences) Black Gasconnes with 'shot' administered worming. They were both in a very sorry state and recovered overnight. This got us thinking about the purpose of 7 days treatment. If the worming is so effective first day surely a follow up on the 7th day will kill any eggs hatched in the meantime? So we are going to experiment with treatment day one and two, then day 7 and see how we get on.

Being the kind of geek that has a microscope I have observed the odd thing that happens if you track worm egg counts through and after worming with Flubenvet. The count drops towards 0 after the first day but doesn't actually reach 0 until about a week after the last day (of the 7.) I don't know why this happens but it does seem that maybe eggs are being liberated from the dead worms and after day one the count doesn't reflect the number of live worms present. Only the most common worm eggs show up in reliably large enough numbers to be informative I've found and they tend to be present in tiny, only just recordable, numbers all the time.
The really harmful ones (like maybe your mystery red worm and the little wriggling worm I spotted in Blaze's runny poop a few weeks ago) haven't shown up in an egg count but then runny poop makes a bad sample.
So, quite possibly with some worms, 1 dose may knock out the small but harmful population. Roundworm does take a few days I think and even then is pretty omnipresent. I think 7 days is the 'does as promised on the tin' reccomendation for all the parasites listed, some of which are pretty uncommon but you never know.

 

[chrismahon]

I'd expect all the worms to die on day 1 or 2 Rick, but that the unhatched eggs would still be present. As they hatch the daily dose of Flubenvet would kill them- however if you just left them alive days 3, 4, 5 and 6 they would still all die on the day 7 dose. This could mean we save a heck of a lot of messing about worming 31 birds and save a fair bit of expensive Flubenvet as well. The newly hatched worms would be too immature to lay more eggs I think. Still, we won't know until we have tried it.

 

[rick]

You may be right Chris but knowing just how effective it is will be difficult measure. They do say a low population of the less aggressive parasites is actually beneficial to health and immunity!
I'm only just starting to get tuned in enough to the signs and symptoms to know when something is wrong enough to need fixing and for most of us the (mostly) guaranteed result of the reccomended course is best. - It rules out one possible cause of puzzling problems.
With experience though...