Chickens and the Common Cold

When the nights grow colder, or even in the spring when the nights grow warmer, chickens tend to become ill.  I wasn't prepared for how fragile my flock was until one of my hens got a cough.

Chickens cough and sneeze and get runny noses.  Beaks. They get a rattle in their chest and start to look droopy and sleep during the day.  They don't try to get away when you go to pick them up. This little girl settled in against me like I was her mama.

 I went down to the local feed store and asked what I could do for my hen.  Unfortunately, no one there had any chicken experience.  So I called my vet.  They didn't work with chickens, so they couldn't help me.  I hit the internet and found www.backyardchickens.com, a fabulous resource for folks like me.

 I found a thread that described upper respiratory diseases in chickens, but there  was so much there I couldn't really diagnose the chicken or decide how to treat her.  By this time she was really sick, and dying.  I wrapped her in a towel and put her in a box on the dryer and she died that night.  And another chicken was sick.  Oddly enough, it was one of the same breed, a Buff Orpington.

My husband works with elderly people, many of whom have lived around here all their lives and kept chickens back in the day.  He described my problem to one of his ladies.  She told him the Buff Orpingtons are "delicate".  I Googled the breed and learned that their feathers do not repel water, like other chickens do.  Ah ha!  It was a rainy spring, and they got wet and took a chill. 

So I drove 25 miles to my local hatchery and asked them.  Hallelujah!  They knew. They sold me some stuff to put in the water and advised me to separate the sick chicken from the flock. By the time I had the right stuff and a plan, all three of the Buffs were dead, and it was too late for the Buffs.  But the other hens were just fine.  Good to know. 

The next time I had a sniffling chicken, I had antibiotics to give her immediately. I pulled her out into a crate  on the porch and nursed her back to health.  Truthfully, though, if a chicken gets this once she will get it again.  And it's not always by breed.  I have some very hardy Americaunas, but I brought home one batch that all came down with upper respiratory disorders.  This is a threat to the rest of the flock.  I don't want to breed those animals, I don't want to spread disease, so when the ill ones passed I was ok with that. 

So, what I learned was that to pull the sick ones out and isolate them.  Try to keep appropriate medication on hand, because the only way to save a hen is to treat her quickly.  If in doubt, call the folks who sold you the chickens.  They know the most about what kind of disease you might be dealing with and they have what you need to treat them.