Chickens 101 - pasting up

If you caught my post from yesterday, I mentioned that I wanted to talk about something potentially lethal to young chicks. Allow me a little digression first. Even before I received my first order of chicks, A~ bought me a very good book, "Living with Chickens". I enjoy it very much for it's simple easy reading. It's not a dry reference manual by any means, so if you prefer that, this is not the book for you. But if you like a good dose of solid information mixed with some personal stories and lots of great photos this may be a great book for you. I get no benefit from referring this book to you, but as I said before, good products deserve good word of mouth advertising. And enough on that...

The issue that I did want to take a minute to cover is called "pasting up"; you can see a picture of it below. It's a rather poorly named condition I think, as it really gives you no idea what it's all about. The reason I mentioned the Living with Chickens book was because it was in it's pages that I first heard about this problem. Chickens will have a tendency, I have found, to hunker down and not do anything when they are stressed. This is particularly true with your chicks, especially after transporting them, but really whenever their schedule is changed. One result of this is that they will often not drink enough water. (This reasoning is purely observational, and not based on any specific expertise, for the record.) This seems to be the cause of "Pasting Up", as I have only had it happen after some sort of shock to the birds.
What pasting up is, in essence, is an unusually thick and "pasty" manure that gets stuck to the chicks feathers around the vent area. In and of itself, this isn't a problem. However, if left unchecked, it can build on itself throughout a matter of hours and eventually close off the chicks vent entirely. The bird, in this case, will not be able to expel waste properly, and will get basically backed up. When this happens, the chicks will stop eating or drinking, because they are filled up. Chicks that don't drink water at least, don't last long. So what do we as responsible chick keepers do? Well, basically the same thing we would do for a baby that messed all over itself, clean it. The picture above is what a chickens vent should look like. I've found that a paper towel soaked with warm water will do the trick very nicely. The chick will complain very loudly, but it is for the best. you may even have to pull a couple of the down feathers that it's stuck to, but again, it's for the best. The bird I lost from the first order that I received was due to this. I didn't know what to look for for the first couple days, and when I found the pasting up advice I immediately knew what it was. By that point it was too late and the chick never recovered.

I know a couple of readers, and a some of the other blogs that I frequent, had had some problems with their chicks this spring. I don't know if this could have had anything to do with it, but since I know there are a couple of you that are looking into getting birds, I wanted to share the information and maybe save a chick sometime down the line. I would have liked to have heard about it sooner. Now that I do know about it, I was able to find it immediately in a couple of our new chicks, and so far no difficulties.

Till tomorrow all...

P~