Photo by Audrey Pavia
Our henhouse : the jot ’ den .
We ’ve had Gwennyth Poultry the longsighted of all our hen , so she has a particular place in my essence . She does n’t mind being pick up and admit , and loves to eat mealworm from my hand . So when she started spending full day cower in the nest boxful , I got worried . She was n’t being broody — no bollock were forthcoming . She clearly did n’t feel well . I decide to take her to my sis , Heidi , who is a veterinary surgeon . Heidi comment that Gwenny ’s properly eyelid was swollen , and prescribed an antibiotic oculus ointment , along with an unwritten antibiotic . We could have draw blood and done go - rays , but Gwenny was still eating and pooping , so we decided to go the conservative ( read “ bum ” ) route . The best time to snag a loose - cast crybaby for medicating is after sundown when they are roosting , so the next night , Randy and I went out to the coop to get Gwenny . I carry her into my saddlery shed so we ’d have light , and that ’s when I noticed them : little red bugs running frantically around her look .
“ Dammit , ” I said to Randy . “ The chickens have mites . ”It just so happens I had just written an article on external parasites forChickensmagazine , so I know what I was dealing with . These were clear poulet mites , which live and breed in the wood of the cage and come out at dark to course on the Gallus gallus . They can cause a chicken to become lethargic , and make the whole quite a little terminate set . Is that why we had n’t gotten any orchis in the preceding couple of weeks?I do n’t believe in using pesticide on my urban farm , so I had to figure out how I was going to tackle this . The only agency to kill the thing without spraying the coop with poison is to use something call diatomaceous earth , aka DE .
This is interesting stuff . It ’s basically the fossilized remains of prehistorical algae that has disintegrate into powder . Because of its microscopically needlelike edges , it slice up the exterior of the bugs and pop them . It ’s all instinctive and does n’t hurt the poulet .
The haul is that it ’s hard to find . I called Home Depot , and they said they had it . So I drove over there only to witness that they had “ pool ” DE , which is unlike than “ solid food ” DE . The pool DE causes Crab . The other one is so harmless you may eat it . Guess which one you are speculate to employ on chickens?Good thing for the cyberspace . After two hours of take around attempt to come up the right-hand kind , I come home , searched the ’ net and find out I could get it through Amazon.com . conceive of that!The next undertaking was Randy ’s . He had to clean out the entire chicken coop , scrub all the wood with soapy water , put back the bedding and then use a flour sifter to send a shower bath of DE all over the coop . For good measure , Heidi order Ivermectin for the flock to kill any mites that survived the DE and dared to sting the volaille . This meant giving a small acid of the liquid to each chicken while they were roosting . Yeah , they get laid that . It ’s only been a few days , but so far , so good . I have n’t find out any soupcon . Gwenny is out running around with the flock now , and some testicle have commence to appear in the nest boxes . Fingers traverse we kill the suckers .
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