Encourage a bird to drink by dipping its beak in a dish of clean water. It may be that all you need to do is adjust the diet.Ģ. Consult a vet or poultry expert to narrow down the possible causes. Lumpy or undigested food: incomplete digestion, foods too hard to digest (corn or maize), stunting syndromeġ. White or clay coloured: Pancreas problem, digestive problems Increased urine: Drinking a lot (perhaps on a hot day), eating foods high in water (eg lettuce), disease (often bacterial)īlack or tar-like: Internal bleeding (high in the digestive tract) Red: Internal bleeding (low in the digestive tract), lead poisoning, kidney disease Ready, set, check the oil: How to give your ride-on mower a spring spruce-up Nb: caecal droppings are normally very smelly.īoth these droppings below might look suspect, but poultry expert Sue Clarke’s assessment is, they’re normal. A noticeably bad smell can be a sign of infection in the digestive tract, most commonly due to a bacterial or yeast infection. Note the colour, or better yet, take photos so your vet or poultry expert can see it.įresh droppings from a healthy chicken don’t smell much unless you take a good, close-up sniff. Occasionally, a bird will shed a small part of its intestinal lining, which will look red, stringy and jelly-like this is normal.įaeces will be runny, and the bird may have symptoms of illness. It’s possibly coccidiosis, a gut-living parasite that can be treated with medication (Coxiprol), or enteritis caused by a bacterial infection. When they do leave the nest, droppings are a lot larger than average and are often very smelly. The colour of foods can change the colour of pooĭark blue-black: berries and seeds, especially dark purple onesīroody hens can have a build-up of manure inside their bodies due to their lack of movement. It plays an important role in fermenting nutrients to produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) which contribute energy to the body. The caecum is a set of two blind-ending tubes at the junction of the large and small intestines, similar to the human appendix. It’s the evacuated contents of the caecum which birds excrete every 8-10 times they poop. A caecal dropping is very smelly, with a thick, wet consistency, and there’s no urates or digested matter.Ĭaecal droppings are completely normal but look quite different from the more common digestive dropping. It has a mustard-yellow to caramel-brown to dark-brown. These tend to be incredibly smelly, as the manure builds up inside the hen’s body as she sits, to create a mega-poo.ġ-2 every day. Droppings vary significantly in size, but broody hens can produce deposits three or four times this size. Older birds often produce a lot more urates than young ones, due to long-term build-up in the kidneys and bladder.ĩ. How these block owners found their perfect animal - goatsħ. Normal, showing the urate crystals coating the outside. It may be straight, coiled, or broken up into smaller, tube-shaped pieces.ġ. Digested matter is the tubular-shaped section in the middle of the dropping. The main solid portion of poo, can be varying shades of green to yellow-brown depending on what the bird is eating. If a bird stops eating because it’s unwell, the urates and urine may be the only ‘faeces’ you’ll see. Sometimes the urine and urates will mix, forming a cloudy liquid. More urine and urates are produced than faeces each day. Urates are the crystalline section of the urine.Ĭlear, watery, like any other animal’s urine. There are three parts to every digestive poo, and a separate caecal dropping.Ī chalky white coating on faeces, isn’t watery but isn’t solid either. The good poo guideġ0-15 digestive droppings per day. Always wash your hands thoroughly after handling manure or poultry. You’ll quickly get to know the look of your flock’s ‘normal’ poo, making it much easier to spot anything abnormal. If you see anything odd, take a photo, and ask your vet or a trusted poultry expert to check it. You can make it easier by placing plain paper or cardboard under the perches at night – don’t use newspaper as it can be difficult to differentiate poo from colours on the paper.ĭo this every week or so as a routine health check, then throw the paper or card into the compost bin. The simplest way to check what’s going on is by looking under their perches each morning. Your flock poo regularly, even when they’re sleeping. With infectious diseases, the earlier the diagnosis, the quicker you can get a sick chicken into quarantine to prevent the spread of infection. It may alert you to an issue before your bird shows the more advanced signs of illness. But there were probably earlier signs of a developing problem if you’d had a good look at its poo. When a chicken becomes unwell, your first clue may be when it sits apart from the rest of the flock, head sunk into its shoulders, fluffed up and looking depressed.
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