Checking in on the Chicks

When you raise chickens, the sight you see below is not what you want to find when you feed and water the birds.

Another one bites the dust...

We have lost a total of three chicks - all of them being the Cornish Cross meat birds. We don't exactly know why they died.  One thing I noticed, though, on the Rhode Island Red birds was that some of them had "Pasty Butt."  Pasty butt is an ailment that chicks get that is essentially diarrhea.  It becomes a serious and often fatal issue, because the poop sticks to them and will actually stop up their vents.  Here is a picture of a chick with pasty butt.  It is not a pretty sight to behold.

Pasty butt can be caused by several things:

1. Stress from being shipped through the mail - our chicks were shipped,
2. Getting too cold - our chicks may have gotten cold as it was cold when they first arrived,
3. Getting too hot - the heat lamps may have gotten the birds too hot,
4. An infection - the birds could have picked up an infection.

The birds must be treated to avoid death.  Two treatments are to either hold the little chick's butt under warm running water or use oil on a Q-tip to remove the poop from their vents.  It was pretty cold on this particular evening and bringing the affected chicks inside for warm baths and blow-drying wasn't the option I went for.  Instead, I used some vegetable oil on a q-tip to remove the poop and lubricate the vent area.

The next photo is not a pretty one, but chicken raising can be nasty business and sometimes it involves dirty work that I'd rather not do.  But I'd also rather not have our chicks dying on us.

I worked on the four or five chicks that were affected and removed the poop from the vent area.  We also added a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to each gallon of water we put in the chicks' waterers.  This happened a week ago and we have not lost any more chicks! This is good news.  We will keep monitoring the situation, but for now the birds appear to be once again healthy and growing.