one project completed!

[harvester]

Im so happy! I finally got hubby up and out and in four hours we built my chicken coop inside my barn. It was easier to do than i thought and came out so nice looking and convienient.
we sank in a 4x4 post in the center of the barn and attatched it to a stud on the roof, then just built a cage out of chick wire and 2x2's around it. hubby did the wood work i did the wire work, my hand is killing me today from the staple gun.
its so cute! its 8x6 and roughly 6' tall. more than enough for the chickens i plan to winter over. all i want to go through the winter is 3-4 spec. sussex hens and at most a trio of silkies.
my dad has one of those metal nest box batteries that we will mount in there for them, and a doggie door will be cut in next weekend so they can come and go. It needs furnishings that I will take care of today and it should be good to go for a while.
I picked up 4 banties, silkie crosses, i think one hen is pure but omg they are the roughest looking chickens ive ever seen! they werent the best taken care of in their lives. i need to worm them and dust them and feed them up real good and they should look better after spring moult. one is laying and the lady said one had already tried to set in feb! ofcourse it failed as we were still getting -30 in feb.
but, its a start on the grasshopper and locust control, i will still be looking for purebred silkies tho. Ill get pics as soon as i can, weather turned nasty today so im not going to go spend much time outside today.

next, on to the pig pen!

[ldsparamedic]

Harvester,
Congrats on your pen and chickens. If the chicks and hens are coming from different sources I'd keep them seperate while you worm them or you risk infecting the chicks as well.
Your wormy hens have the ability to infect any other birds as well as themselves again if you don't clean up all of their manure as it will be full of worm eggs.

I always have a quarantine cage for any new adult birds that is kept seperate from my flock to prevent any disease or parasite infestations.

Good luck with your new cage and birds.

[momma_to_seven_chi]

Congratulations on your new coop. I'm sure your hens will look great in a few weeks.

Will it be hard to clean contained in the back of a building that way? Cleaning coops is the nastiest job on earth! Give me a rabbit shed or a barn stall anyday over a chicken coop!. ICK!

[harvester]

Actually no, we designed it specifically for easy cleaning, hubby built me a 4 foot door so i can get the wheelbarrow in there if i need to, but for the most part its just raking it up right out the door and into the wheelbarrow for the garden. *there is no threshold at the door just for this reason. im just excited about it.

however guess what...OMG!! I finally got to go out and take a really good look at these chickens this woman gave me. I was just sickened when i got past trying to figgure out what they were crossed with and looked at their legs! they have leg mites so horribly they have lost toes over it. the crust on their legs is so thick its crippling to them. these chickens just dont feel good at all.
I called murdochs and asked them if they had silkie bantam chicks in yet. the guy said yea, and if your interested please come down now. so i went down there and picked out 8 silkie banties. the guy says how many chickens do you really want, i know bantams are expensive. i told him id take all i could get. so he starts scooping up armloads of chicks and putting them in my box. i got an assortment with mostly silkies, a few cochins, im thinking some may be sebrights and a couple unidentified as yet. he said here, your box is full or id give you more, come back friday and you can have all thats left if you want them all...i paid for 8 chicks and best count i could tell i got 28-30 chicks!

so, im finishing my lunch as i write this. then im gonna go out and put those poor sick chickens down so they dont further contaminate my ground. i picked up some med to dr the ground with and the walls and surrounding area. and when its all done ill put a few adjustments on the coop so its banty chick proof and a heat lamp and put my many many wee chicks out there in a few days.
since those birds have only been on that soil (with no bedding material thank gawd!) overnight im hoping 2-3 days soaking in the bug killer then a slight soil scraping followed by cedar bedding and chicks should be fine.
im gonna have chicks comming out of my ears this year!

luckily i am aware of quarrantine and none of my other animals or birds were ever near the new chickens. So im hoping for an easy fix.

i swear, the messes i get myself into sometimes!
never buy chickens from anyone, no matter how highly recommended, in the dark! lol

[Anon001]

Harvester,

An old time remedy is to dip the legs in used motor oil. That will kill the mites and "stuff" but won't hurt the chickens. It's that simple to rid them of it and then they will be fine.

Any chicken house is susceptible to mites. I have had them in mine twice in the last 15 years. but one dipping and it was done and no more problem.

[harvester]

yes i am aware of the motor oil treatment, as well as the deisel treatment, the pyrethrin dip treatment, the vaseline treatment and several others. ive used them myself many time.
but with this case this is brand new land, and id rather not start off with an infection that will take years to get rid of if it can be gotten rid of at all. which i highly doubt short of burning down the barn. ive dealt with leg mites many times before and it takes a long time to rid the chickens of them, and years to rid your property of them, id just rather not take that chance and get this property off to a dirty start.
ive tried to be especially carefull to bring only healthy animals onto this property. upon dispatching these chickens they were also quite infected under their skins due to scarring and damage done by other birds. usually a healthy bird will not infect with such damage. these ones were in bad shape.
they had more going on with them than just the nast mites, those mites had taken off toes and were crippling them. the mite crust was atleast 2 inches deep. more humane to put them down.

[Anon001]

It is not hard to get rid of mites on chickens and does not take a long time. And anyone that has wild birds in the area are prone to mites. WIld birds carry them in huge numbers.... so mites are just a fact of life with poultry that you have to regularly use preventive measures with.

[harvester]

well ofcourse you have to use preventative measures.
i dont have much wild birds here. wild birds will bring in feather mites but ive yet to see a wild bird infected with scaley leg.
it takes months to kill the mites completely off of any infected chicken. and mites will live in wood for a long long time making them very difficult to get at and very difficult to iradicate.
what it comes down to is this paul, i simply will not allow an ill animal, or an animal infected with ANYTHING to come onto my place and run the risk of infecting not only my animals, but my land as well. that is the best preventative care that anyone can do to protect their animals. I personally find it extremely irresponsible to deliberately infect your own healthy animals by bringing in unhealthy ones.
If my birds already had scaley leg then i would have dealt with it, full well knowing that it is something that would reoccur time and time again for the entire time i wished to have poultry on my property. (once infected, always infected. short of a wildfire)
I dont want bugs. I dont want disease. simple as that.
as it is now, just from that small exposure that happened to my brand new coop I will have to use very strict preventative measures against scaley leg for an entire year to make sure that the wood in my barn and the coop and the soil isnt harboring any stow away mites. even a teeny mite can do extensive damage to poultry, eventually ending in death. a very long drawn out death to boot. Why would i even consider allowing these nasty birds to infect my clean soil? that doesnt even make sence. and ultimately it is my decesion what i do with my own property.
if you dont mind having bugs and disease on your property thats your decision.
i have a very small place here, easy to take preventative measures with. due to the fact our place is so small we have to invest in the highest quality animals possible. I have alot of investement in my few little chickens that i do have already. they are stunningly beautiful birds and high producers. I will not risk the work and investment ive done with these birds for the sake of trying to save a few crossbred bug ridden ill birds whos chances of survival is less than 50% anyway. there is killing with kindness and forcing ill birds to live, or there is humanely dispatching them so they are out of their suffering.

[momma_to_seven_chi]

I know this is probably a silly question, but...........

Can you eat them if you dispose of them? *Or do those mites make the hens unfit for consumption. Would they be hound food or people food?

I've never heard of anything like that. *I just put a few drops of ivomec in the water during the "off" season when they aren't laying in the winter, so I assume that keeps it from happening?

[harvester]

oh sure you could eat them, but trust me, with the other problems going on with these chickens you wouldnt have wanted to. I wont even boil them down in my kitchen to give to my dogs..not for the sake of the dogs, but simply because i dont want those nasty things in my house let alone my kitchen.
had it just been mites i would have considered it honestly. but it wasnt just mites.

[Anon001]

well ofcourse you have to use preventative measures.
i dont have much wild birds here. wild birds will bring in feather mites but ive yet to see a wild bird infected with scaley leg.
it takes months to kill the mites completely off of any infected chicken. and mites will live in wood for a long long time making them very difficult to get at and very difficult to iradicate.
what it comes down to is this paul, i simply will not allow an ill animal, or an animal infected with ANYTHING to come onto my place and run the risk of infecting not only my animals, but my land as well. that is the best preventative care that anyone can do to protect their animals. I personally find it extremely irresponsible to deliberately infect your own healthy animals by bringing in unhealthy ones.
If my birds already had scaley leg then i would have dealt with it, full well knowing that it is something that would reoccur time and time again for the entire time i wished to have poultry on my property. (once infected, always infected. short of a wildfire)
I dont want bugs. I dont want disease. simple as that.
as it is now, just from that small exposure that happened to my brand new coop I will have to use very strict preventative measures against scaley leg for an entire year to make sure that the wood in my barn and the coop and the soil isnt harboring any stow away mites. even a teeny mite can do extensive damage to poultry, eventually ending in death. a very long drawn out death to boot. Why would i even consider allowing these nasty birds to infect my clean soil? that doesnt even make sence. and ultimately it is my decesion what i do with my own property.
if you dont mind having bugs and disease on your property thats your decision.
i have a very small place here, easy to take preventative measures with. due to the fact our place is so small we have to invest in the highest quality animals possible. I have alot of investement in my few little chickens that i do have already. they are stunningly beautiful birds and high producers. I will not risk the work and investment ive done with these birds for the sake of trying to save a few crossbred bug ridden ill birds whos chances of survival is less than 50% anyway. there is killing with kindness and forcing ill birds to live, or there is humanely dispatching them so they are out of their suffering.

You act as though I was attacking you when all I did was offer a suggestion. In response to your insinuatios, I will have you know that I do NOT bring unhealthy animals to my property at all. When you have as much land as I do and you have as many thousands of dollars tied up in livestock (over $50.000+) you will know that I can't take as much risk as you can.

Not only that but you state that it is your decision and I certainly agree with you but I also was not saying you had to do it another way. I was merely giving a suggestion at eliminating a SIMPLE case of mites. After that you went on to state how bad it was.

what it comes down to is this paul, i simply will not allow an ill animal, or an animal infected with ANYTHING to come onto my place and run the risk of infecting not only my animals, but my land as well

....and yet that is exactly what you did.

I think you need to stop acting like I'm your enemy and realize that I was only trying to help... which I will not make the same mistake again, with you...

No need to reply because I will not read any other postings under your topic.

I hope you have a good day and I sincerely hope you get your problem taken care of with the least amount of trouble or damage to your other hens and property.

Paul

[harvester]

well its about time!

[Anon001]

I lied.....

[harvester]

lol aparantly.