subject: Find Out What Two Common Chicken Parasites Are and How to Get Rid of Them [print this page] Did you know that there are a varietyof common chicken parasites that can infest your flock of chickens?Chicken parasites can make your hens miserable and can even lead to death. So, it is important that youlearn how to get rid of them.
Two common chicken parasites that your chicken flock can be infested with include lice and red mites. These two parasites affect the health of your flock. Your birds will look bad, their demeanor will be depressed and physically their combs may be pale.
How can you identify the different parasites and how do you get rid of them?
Lice. Lice are small, creamy brown parasites that crawl all over the bodies of your chickens. They tend to lay their eggs by the chickens rear ends and you can identify them as chalky white blogs that are stuck to the feathers at the base. Your birds get lice by direct contact with infected birds so be sure to always quarantine new birds.
The general belief is that lice do not suck blood from your chickens but rather eat the dead skin and debris from the feathers. But they irritate your birds so badly that they pick at themselves which causes sores to develop and depresses your birds.
You can easily get rid of lice on chickens by dipping your birds in malathion and dusting the entire chicken house (and everything in it) and your chicken run with a sulphur based insecticide dust. You need to repeat every few days initially to get rid of them.
Red mites. Red mites can be harder to find and get rid of since they only come out to feed at night. Because they are hard to detect, you can literally be infested with millions of these parasites within a few weeks.
Mites will bite your chickens, you and your pets and easily hide in your carpet and walls if you carry them inside with you. Mites typically spread at night via rats and mice. If you do not catch them early and treat your chickens for them it causes anemia and death in your birds.
Mites are a lot harder to get rid of them lice. You can find them by looking for a white powdery dust on the surfaces of your hen house. Also look for tiny reddish brown blogs which are the mite feces. Look for mites in your chicken house at night using a powerful flashlight. They will crawl away from the light when you shine it on them. Baby mites look pale gray in color.
It is a two step process to actually get rid of mites.
First, you have to protect your chickens from being bitten and then you have to find and kill the mites where they hide. A malathion bath is probably one of the best treatments you can use.
Second, you then need to completely clean out your chicken house by removing all feeders, waters, nesting boxes, etc. to expose hiding places. If possible, you need to burn old bedding to kill any mites in it and replace perches if you can. Then use one or two insecticide bombs inside the hen house. Then coat everything you can with kerosene and be sure to get into every crack and crevice that you can. This process needs to be done every five days at least three or four times in order to kill newly hatch mites as the eggs are not killed during this process.
Find Out What Two Common Chicken Parasites Are and How to Get Rid of Them
