dying poults what can it be?

[markyboy]

guys i need help with a problem at my local shoot,we got our poults the first wk in june and all was well lost a few to foxes. then 3 weeks later the guy we get our birds off gave us some birds that hadnt feathered well and werent that great but we didnt complain as we get them every year with no probs. but just the last week on checking the birds each night we are finding dead birds and dying birds. at the pen we realesed the later birds.the bin ends if you like.

we treated all our birds for gapes with panacure and you hear the odd cough but nothing major. but we keep finding these bird some are well featherd and all are as thin as rakes,the dying ones when you pick them up have an almost clear liquid dripping from there beeks and smells really bad.

can anybody help as to what this might be? as we are finding them all the time and we will fast have no birds left.

 

thanks

[Stealth Stalker]

Sounds like hexamiter (spelling) to me you need to get some infected birds to the vet quick & he should be able to prescribe the best medication, we had what you described last year & it went through the pen like a dose of salts, lost near on 100 birds

[markyboy]

what causes this?

[Stealth Stalker]

Not too sure, the vet gave us some medication and they were right as rain in a couple of days, if it is Hexy you need to act fast!

[scolopax]

We have had a nightmare with it this year, exactly the same reasons. Bought some good poults and were given some more by a 'keeper mate, unfortunately these 'poor growers' seem to have passed on the Hexamita. Looking at a 25% loss in one pen minimum and it is still ongoing in another. I'm not popular as I donated a crate of these freebies to a syndicate shoot I am in....

 

Hexamita is a protozoa which occurs naturally in the gut, stress causes it too get out of balance and basically multiply like hell. The bird will eat and drink but not absorb any nutrients, they waste away to walking skeletons.

[Highlander]

A good stockman/keeper would never mix birds from different sources. A recipe for disaster as pheasants especially will find any number of ways to die before you can push 'em over the guns.

[markyboy]

ours didnt come from a dif source just boorn at a dif time and hadnt formed aswel as others

[norfolk boy]

sounds like hexi to me also, we don't even mix hatches in our release pens and we rear our own but you just never know, best to be as safe as possible in my mind.

[Paul223]

if it's hexi the birds very often will huddle together to keep warm and die from suffercation, or waste away, both due to the inabillity of the gut to absorb food, always seek the advice of a vet but also i would

put out grit trays with clean grit on a regular basis, hexi passes on through the birds picking at the floor and building up a high level of bacteria (protazoa whatever you want to call it) the more they pick in each others dirt the bigger the problem in the gut

and feed a strong glucose solution with the water, most of it will be wasted and passed through but the more the gut is presented with the better the chance of some absorbsion

 

and what ever the vet sugests, usually some antibiotics, amoxicillin will disolve in the water and mixing it with a touch of semi skimmed milk will allow you to bleed it through to each drinker (you'll see the white) so that treatment starts straight away

[scolopax]

Amoxicillin (Vetromox) sorted our first batch out quite quickly (given to us by the supplier). I also invested in some of the Janssen game bird tonic to try and get some nutrients into them, which certainly has not done them any harm.

 

When the second pen (different shoot) came down with it the vet put them on Denagard even though I asked for Vetromox, this has not worked and they are still dying at a steady rate. Hopefully my mate has been back to the vets this AM to get the Vetromox which we initially wanted.

 

Apart from that I invested in some new drinkers and put out plenty of grit for them.