Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
NEVER SAY NEVER
When I first purchased our farm, I said I was never going to have to deal with lice
or mites. Poultry hadn't been raised there for 25 years, making it unlikely that lice
and mites that enjoyed poultry as hosts had survived since outbreaks decades ago. I
planned to start only with baby chicks, which are less likely to spread disease than
their adult kin because they do not have lice or mites when they come out of an in-
cubator, and I was not going to take my birds to poultry shows or any place where
they could be exposed to the nasty little creatures. I felt confident that I would never
have to treat for lice or mites. Was I ever wrong!
I purchased chicks from an April hatch and one day that fall, when I was picking
up and sorting my flock into different breeding pens, I noticed tiny little things crawl-
ing around on my arm. Sure enough, despite my efforts to isolate them, my flock had
lice.
Where did they come from, you might ask? Wild birds, of course. I learned the
hard way that pigeons, sparrows, starlings, and other birds that travel from farm to
farm carry these parasites from place to place.
If the vision of these bloodsuckers crawling on my arm freaks you out, don't be
afraid. These lice and mites feast only on poultry and other birds. They will not take
up residence on you; they will crawl around on you only until they find a way off.
Poultry lice are more oblong in shape and tend to be kind of a clear or yellowish col-
or.
Treatment
There are no salves or medicinal cures for birds infested with gnats. Adult fowl usually
die — not from blood loss, but from the stress and pain of the insects crawling around
and into their ears. The only measure I have ever found to be effective against gnats is
keeping a fan on the birds to move the air and keep the gnats from settling down and
feeding. A fan that rotates is best.
Common Diseases
I highly recommend that anyone truly invested in raising poultry and keeping them
healthy should purchase Storey's guidebook
The Chicken Health Handbook.
This topic
is a complete guide to the many (many!) diseases and ailments that can develop within
your flock. It's impossible to try to match in this volume the detailed information
covered in that guide; numerous diseases exist that the average poultry person will never
