Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to thank you for joining this evening's webinar on breeding and hatching eggs. I just like to remind everyone that there's an extensive set of notes to accompany this evening's webinar.
So, rather than furiously scribbling down and various bits of information, there's no need to, it should all be in the notes provided. So we're going to jump straight in with some general considerations for breeding backyard poultry. As with people that want to breed dogs, the first question you've got to ask owners is why on earth do they want to start breeding poultry in the first place?
Is it because they want to see a few cute little fluffy chicks with their broody hen for their kids to see? Are they hoping to make a commercial business out of it, or are they breeding and showing rare breeds of chickens? Now as with breeding dogs, if you do it properly, you won't make any money, and there's absolutely zero money to be made in breeding either hybrid chickens or indeed birds for the shoe ring.
You've also got to take into account how the owner got enough space to breed chickens. It's really important to keep age groups separate from a disease control point of view, and we'll touch on this later on in this evening's webinar. We've also got to think about genetics if you're breeding purebred poultry or the parent stock that you've got up to scratch, and you've got to be prepared for the fact that some of the chicks you hatch out won't have the correct confirmation or indeed plumage colour.
So what's going to happen to the the females that aren't genetically perfect? Have you got an outlet for them? A much greater concern to people breeding chickens is spare males.
So unfortunately, 50% of all the eggs that hatch out are going to be male chicks, and unfortunately, rehoming them is almost impossible. In a perfect world, these spare males will be fattened for cooking, but unfortunately, due to genetics, they tend not to have the breast confirmation, and they tend to grow really, really slowly. So the sad fact of life is that most of these unwanted male chicks tend to get euthanized, and I think that's a moral consideration and certainly for someone attaching chicks under a broody hen, they really need to get their head around this.
How are they going to explain to their kids what happens to these unwanted cockerels? We also need to think about the disease status of your proposed parent stock. If they've got mycoplasma, this can be virtually transmitted.
And similarly, if they've got salmonella, this can come through the egg for certain species of salmonella. And you also need time to plan. So a chicken will take 3 weeks to hatch from the point of incubation, and to go back even further, a hen can store sperm for up to 2 weeks.
So if your hens are running around with lots of different cockerreels, you're going to have to separate them and put them with your desired father of your chicks, and for at least 2 weeks before you can start collecting eggs to hatch. And to add to all these problems, we've also got to think of the time of year in which you want to hatch out your chicks. Most commercial breeders tend to hatch their chicks in the new year, and they'll set their first eggs in early January.
Like many other animals, chickens are photosensitive, and when the day length exceeds approximately 13 hours of flight, chickens come into lay. So, if we want to be hatching chicks in January, we've got to be looking at selecting our birds in early October and stimulating them to come into lay at the end of October in and around Halloween time. Now a 60 watt bulb is absolutely perfect for the job, and what we want to do is take them from natural daylight and increase the lighting artificially from an 8 hour day by about 1 hour a week up until we get these birds to approximately 13 or 14 hours of light, and that will stimulate these birds to come into lay.
One potential problem the owners may have is if they've left their birds in a coop with the light on 24/7 or 23 hours a day, these birds will become refractory to light, and it will be impossible to light them up. So actually thinking about your breeding season, you need to be thinking several months in advance. So here we've got an image of the birds doing the deed themselves, and we can see here that the cockle is climbing on the back of the chicken.
He grabs onto the top of her head with his beak, and he climbs on top of her, and the vents of the two birds will be touching. The cockerel has got a pseudo penis which fills with lymph, and he will deposit his semen in her vent. I have to say chicken mating is incredibly clumsy, and I think that's why chickens have evolved to store sperm for 2 weeks, because almost the majority of matings are unsuccessful.
When we come to cockerel selection, you can see that we've got two very different buoys here in our photographs. On the left-hand side, we've got a buff Warpington, which is classed as a heavy breed, and you can find out whether breeds are classed as light or heavy on the poultry Club website. And on the right hand side we've got a light breed and that is a red jungle fal cockerel.
Irrespective of what breed that you're going to choose, it's important to make sure that your males are the correct body weight for their breed target. If they're too heavy, it can interfere with mating and can damage fertility. Now I think although most of you might not necessarily be poultry experts, you can tell by looking at these two cockerels that the cockerel on the right is going to be much more successful at mating than the cockerel on the left.
So, as a rule of thumb for a heavy breed, such as our beforepington here, we would put him with 4 females, whilst for our light breeds on the right-hand side, we would tend to give that cockle about 10 to 15 hens to mate with. And this is known as the mating ratio. Another thing to think about when selecting a cockerel is to have a look at their spurs.
Now in bygone days, the spurs were an essential part of cockfighting, but today, really sharp spurs can lacerate the flanks of a female being mated and can cause life threatening injuries. So it's really important if you're breeding from cockques to trim their spurs down, and you can just file these done with a normal file. As cockles get older, their spurs tend to increase in length.
When it comes to thinking about our hens, again, we want to make sure that they are fit but not fat, and the target body weights for each breed can be found on the poultry Club website. We can see here that our hen has been over mated. At the top of her head, you can see where there's some feather loss where the cockle's beak has been grabbing onto her during mating, and you can see along the bottom of her back, his feet have removed some of the feathers from her.
For reasons that I don't fully understand. Cockerels tend to have a favourite hen within the group, and he will continuously mate with this one chicken. So there's 3 potential solutions for this poor girl.
One option would be to remove the cockquiel, but that's going to damage your fertility and hatching. Another option is to remove the hen that's been picked on for mating, but again, you're going to ruin her chances of laying fertile eggs. So the third option, and probably my preferred option is to go for a snazzy saddle, which you can see on the right hand side.
And after the end of the webinar, if you get a few moments, I'd recommend googling and fashion for poultry, and you'll come up with a whole range of different patterned saddles that you can get for hens, and this will protect her from the most of the mating damage from the cockerel. You can see here on the left hand side we've got some girls, and the chicken on the left hand side has got a bald bum. So when chickens are mating, and this applies to cockles and hens, you tend to find that the feathers get rubbed away from around their vent and the bear skin becomes red, and this is totally normal and not a disease and just something to be aware of and make owners aware of.
A couple of other considerations for our hens. On the right-hand side, this is the internal organs of an overweight hen, and this bird actually died due to obesity. The fat had filled her respiratory tract and she couldn't breathe.
But it's very important that the hens are overweight to be aware that they can become egg bound, and they're not providing balanced nutrition into the eggs, which will subsequently become our chick. Breeding poultry should be fed a commercial pallet or mash with no treats, and that includes grain. Any mixed corn will imbalance the diet and could potentially affect the progeny.
On the left-hand side, we can see the vent of a chicken with faecal material caked around a vent. This faecal material can then interfere with mating and can potentially transmit disease, so I certainly wouldn't be breeding from a hen with a dirty vent. Similarly, it's important that all breeding stock are regularly wormed and are treated for red mite.
The next consideration is where the eggs are laid. Typically we want one nest for about 4 to 5 laying hens. We want clean eggs for hatching, and it's really important that the nest has got fresh wood shavings and that wood shavings are replaced every week.
Now one interesting fact that you may not know is that when a chicken lays an egg, there's approximately 60,000 cells in the embryo, so actually the chick has started to develop even before the egg is laid. When the egg is laid and cools down, the embryo enters stasis, and it's not until the hen becomes broody and sits on the eggs for a continued period of time that the embryo will reactivate and start to grow. Now if you are really sluggish at collecting your eggs, when this hen leaves the nest, the egg will cool down and the next hen jumps on it, the egg will warm up again, and it starts to cause damage to the embryo as it starts to reactivate and then deactivate, and this can impact on fertility and hatching.
So it's really important if you're collecting eggs for incubation that you collect them at least once a day and ideally 3 times. Now on the right hand side we've got an undesirable egg, and this egg is covered in dirt. Potentially this egg could hatch with a viable chick, but there's a good chance that the chick inside will die during either incubation or shortly after hatching.
And what's even worse, it can potentially contaminate the rest of the chicks in the incubator. Now some people advocate washing these eggs with disinfectant, but remember that the egg is surrounded by a waxy cuticle, which protects the egg from bacteria entering in through the pores. If you wash the egg, you will remove the cuticle and you will allow bacteria at greater route of entry.
And we can see here on the right hand side this is an egg under a UV lamp, and you can see at the top there this is where the cuticle has been washed off where someone has been washing hatching eggs and then trying to sell them on eBay. So if you do buy eggs online, and I'll mention this in a minute, and it's worth casting a UV light over them to check that they haven't been washed. My thought process is if an egg is dirty enough to require it to be washed, it is too dirty for either eating or for incubation.
Now it is quite common for people to buy eggs on eBay. It's a good way of increasing the genetics of your flock, and it's relatively cheap. But the problem is you don't know about the genetics of the eggs you're buying and you don't know about the disease status of the parent stock.
So I would urge caution for any owners thinking about doing this. The next thing we want to think about is how we're going to store our eggs. Remember, we've got 60,000 cells worth of an embryo sitting in each of these eggs, and we've got to look after them properly.
What owners must not do is put the eggs in the incubator as they're laid, because what you tend to find is that you want all your chicks to hatch in the one edge in the one day so that you can manage them all in terms of temperature and nutrition. If you have one chick hatching today, one tomorrow, one the next day, then the chicks are going to be multiple ages. They're going to want different temperatures and different food, and potentially from a disease point of view, as with all animals, multi-age is always bad.
So ideally we would store our eggs at 75% humidity. And for the 1st 7 days, they would be stored at about 20 degrees, so about room temperature, and between 8 and 14 days, we would drop that temperature down to 15 degrees. You can store eggs for 3 weeks before incubating them, but the fertility drops dramatically, and generally when you store eggs for more than 7 days, the the fertility really does drop like a stone.
So I'm gonna hand you back to Richard for our first pull question of the evening. Thank you, Richard. Yeah, so the first question is, I'll just launch it now for you.
It's when should eggs be washed? Is that always for hatching only, for eating only, or never? So when should eggs be washed?
So, when should eggs be washed? No one has said always, no one has said for hatching only. 17% have said for eating only, and 83% have said you should never wash eggs.
Back to you, Richard. Brilliant. And of course the answer is that you should never wash eggs.
If they're dirty enough to be washed, then you shouldn't eat them or incubate them. So we're now going to move on to how we want to incubate these eggs that we've collected for hatching. In the good old days, people used to use a broody hen.
So what would normally happen in the wild is that the chicken would lay a clutch of approximately 15 eggs, and once she'd laid a full clutch of eggs, she would then become broody due to hormonal changes. A broody hen will sit continuously on a nest for 3 weeks until these eggs hatch out with some beautiful fluffy little chicks. During that time, she will only leave the nest for a few brief minutes every day to defecate, to have a quick drink and have a little bit of food.
She will turn the eggs several times a day to ensure that the eggs are evenly warmed and to stop the embryos sticking to one side of the shell. Whenever you come close to a broody hen, she will puff up her feathers as you can see in the middle photograph, and if you get really close, she'll growl, and if you get even closer, she will attack you, and I can promise you an aggressive broody hen is much more dangerous and harmful than an aggressive cockerel. After 21 days, once the chicks hatch out, the hen will then leave the nest with a brood of chicks and go off to find food and water.
Now during the broody period, the chickens will become a little bit lethargic, and they are very vulnerable to disease, particularly red mite. So I'd always encourage you to make sure that if you're going to have a broody hen, that you use mic powder on the feathers and on the nesting material. Bbroodiness is highly genetic, with phantoms and silky chickens being very vulnerable to broodiness and modern hybrids being very resistant to broodiness.
If you want to try and stimulate broodiness in the chicken, I would put some golf balls or some porcelain eggs in the nest. Do not put the eggs you want to incubate in the nest because all that's going to happen is that you might have the chicken jumping in and out half broody on the way to becoming broody, and you'll get partial development of that embryo which will go on to damage it. Probably much more of interest to you all this evening is the use of artificial incubators, and it was the Egyptians that actually developed the incubators originally they were experimenting using sunlight to incubate eggs.
I want you to think of incubators like you would an oven. You can have a fan-assisted incubator or a still air incubator just like your ovens. On the left-hand side, we've got a very basic incubator and on the right hand side, we've got a very fancy one.
With a fan assisted incubator, you get a much more even distribution of heat and therefore you'll get much better hatchability out of your eggs. However, these incubators are both harder to clean and considerably more expensive. There's a couple of considerations with your incubator that you need to think about.
First and foremost, you need to think about temperature. All incubators will have thermostats and should be set at 37.7 °C.
Remember, the temperature of a bird is much warmer than a mammal. We need to think about humidity. The humidity in an incubator should be 65%.
During the incubation period, an egg should lose 12% of its mass. If the egg loses too much water, the embryo will dehydrate and will be unable to hatch. If the egg doesn't lose enough water, then the embryo will drown whenever it becomes conscious and tries to hatch out.
Our artificial incubators need to be able to turn the eggs, so the incubator on the right hand side has got a turning cradle. The incubator on the left requires these eggs to be turned manually, and if you're going to manually turn eggs, it must be done 3 times a day until day 18 of incubation. After day 18, you don't need to worry about turning the eggs.
When it comes to humidity management of the incubator, most of them will have either a well in there or a little tank. Very fancy incubators will have a humidity metre and will artificially control it. But with simpler ones, you've got to add or remove water to try and maintain that humidity.
Not all incubators come with a humidity metre, but I'd highly recommend buying one. You can also buy data loggers which will record the temperature and humidity every minute for 21 days, and if you do have hatching problems, you can then hook this up to your computer and print off a nice graph and identify if there was any problems with the temperature or the humidity. Remember, incubators can be quite difficult to clean, and I would always use a hairdryer to blow out any dust and then wash the wash the incubator down with household detergents such as washing up liquid, and then let it dry and then cover the incubator with a general purpose disinfectant such as poultry shield.
Now at day 18 of incubation, our egg begins to pip. So what does that mean? Well, at day 18, the chick becomes conscious and it starts to try and hatch out and it'll just tap gradually at one point in the egg until the shell breaks, and then that will allow oxygen into the chick and it will gradually work its way around the egg until it emerges.
I often wondered when I was growing up how on earth did a tiny little embryonic chick manage to break the shell of a big strong egg. But throughout incubation, as the chick grows, it will extract calcium from the eggshell to strengthen its bones, and at the same time this will weaken the shell, making it easier to hatch. During the pipping process, the embryonic chick will start to chat to other chicks within other eggs, and they will almost encourage the other chicks on the hatch.
Now you might think at this stage when the chick is pipped that you can go and help the chick out through breaking the shell, but I can promise you that that will only end in disaster, and there's two reasons for it. Firstly, in order to do it, you've got to open the incubator and you're letting all that humidity out, and that can dehydrate the hatching chick. The other problem with it is that this chick inside this egg will have its yolk sac externalised, and it's during the last few hours of hatching that the yolk sack is actually internalised into the chick.
So if we were to help this chick out, you'd find that it's not fully formed and it would bleed like crazy. So throughout the hatching process, the chick severs the blood vessels that supply the shell membranes. So never ever hatch chicks.
If they need help hatching, then they're not going to be viable, happy, healthy chicks when they come out. I've got some gruesome pictures to show you all in the next few slides, but bear with me. I just wanted to show you an embryo of a chick on day 9 of incubation, and I want you to appreciate just how fast these chicks develop and just how vascular the eggs are.
So if you do break an egg, there'll be a lot of blood everywhere. No. I want to talk a little bit about some of the problems with hatching.
Between 10 and 18 days of incubation, many owners will do what's known as candling eggs, and basically it means to take them into a dark room and shine a glorified torch through them to have a look at the embryos. It's really easy with white shelled eggs, but with brown shelled eggs, it can be very difficult sometimes to clearly see the embryo developing inside. And this allows us to do two things.
We can first of all check that there is an embryo there, that the egg is actually fertile, and secondly, if it is fertile, is the embryo the right size for its age. So this embryo is roughly about 9 days of age in this egg. But if this was an egg being counted at 18 days, you would say that the embryo died approximately around 9 days of incubation.
So it can help us try and identify where the problems occurred. Generally, if I saw this at day 18, I would think there's been a problem with temperature and humidity. It could be bacteria, and if you weren't sure, you could crack open the egg and actually smell inside it.
And if it smells normal egginess, then you would say that it's not infection, it's probably temperature or humidity. But if you have got a horrible foul rotten egg smell, then the chances are it's bacterial infection either from a dirty nest or from a dirty egg that's been put in the incubator. Remember that dirty infected eggs have a habit of exploding the incubator and they will aerosolize lots of E.
Coli, Pseudomonas, and Proteus, and that can infect the hatching chicks, and it can also allow the damp naples of other hatching chicks to become readily infected with E. Coli. So it's advisable to candle eggs between 10 and 18 days and remove non-viable embryos for the sake of the rest of the eggs in the incubator.
On the left hand side, we've got an infertile egg, and again these should be removed. Generally, infertile eggs are a consequence of either poor egg storage, so it could be egg edge, or indeed, they're down to the cockerel not doing his job properly. And I think generally a lethargic cockrel not doing his job would be my number one guess for having an infertile egg.
On the right hand side, I'm afraid to say we've got some egg breakouts, so that means that we've broken into unhatched eggs to try and find out what on earth's going on. And normally when you get this picture of quite fully developed embryos that haven't hatched, you tend to think it's going to be due to either infection and again think about the smell of the egg. You could stick a swab in there and try and see if there's a nasty E.
Coli or pseudomonas infection, or more commonly, it's down to incubator humidity. So if the incubator gets too dry at the end of hatching, this chick will not be able to hatch out because the membranes dry and they stick to the chick and they restrict its movement and they will kill it. I'm now going to hand you back to Richard for our 2nd full question of the evening.
Thank you. So launching the whole question now, and the question is, how often do eggs need turning in incubators as a minimum? How often do eggs need turning in incubators at minimum?
Is it once a day, twice a day, 3 times a day, or hourly? So not everyone's prepared to put their neck on the line for this one, but we've had 25% say once a day. No one has said twice a day.
75% have said 3 times a day and no one has gone for the very labour intensive hourly, so back to you, Richard. Well, the answer is, of course, a minimum of 3 times a day. If you wanted to turn them hourly, it wouldn't be a problem, but it would be a heck of a lot of work.
But certainly if you turn them less than 3 times a day, you can get uneven warming of the egg and the embryos sticking to one side of the shell. We're not going to talk about what to do when we've got our fluffy little chicks. If the chicks hatch out with a mother hen, it's really straightforward.
She will help them find food and water as long as you've got some food available and you've got drinkers that the chicks cannot drown in. But for most owners, they're going to artificially brood the chicks, and you tend to find that the chicks that hatch out artificially, you've got a much lower mortality. Some other hens are rather clumsy.
I should have also mentioned that our typical fertility rates of eggs are approximately 85%, that's roughly how many chicks you should get out of 100 eggs. So to talk a little bit about brooding, well, we don't have our mother hen here, so the first thing that we need to provide our day chicks with is warmth. And most people elect to use an infrared heat lamp, although you can use a gas heater.
Now underneath the middle of the gas heater or infrared lamp, the temperature should be 40 °C, and at the coolest part of your chick pen, it should be 20 degrees. We should decrease the temperature by approximately 0.3 degrees per day until the chicks reach down to room temperature, temperature wise.
And you can do this by just increasing the height of the heat lamp or the brooder from the floor. You want to put no more than 16 chicks per metre squared, and that will allow them enough space up to 3 months up to 3 weeks of age. It's really important that the chicks are provided with fresh, clean water, and you need to make sure that the chicks cannot drown in the drinker.
So you can see here we've got a little fountain drinker in the far side of the photograph. Because the water is going to get warm really rapidly and the chicks like to climb in the drinkers, it's really, really important that you change the water at least twice a day, otherwise harmful bacteria will start to breed. And we want to think about food for our baby chicks.
Again, it's important that they're fed a chick crumb and not a layer's palate or mash. Layers pellets or mash contain high levels of calcium, and they can actually cause diarrhoea in young chicks. Also, the particle size isn't correct.
A chick crumb will have a high level of protein and will provide the right nutrients for a readily growing chick, and they'll get these birds off to the best possible start. I would tend to recommend wood shavings for bedding baby chicks. And the other thing that you might notice in this picture is it's very bright.
In the wild, a mother hen would peck at food and peck at water to show the little chicks where to eat and drink, but because the chicks don't have their mum, you need to brightly illuminate the drinkers and the feeders so the chicks can find food and water. Whenever chicks hatch out, they've got their yolk sack within them, and that will give them food reserves for up to 5 days of age. So chicks have got 5 days to learn to eat and drink, and if they haven't learned to eat and drink in 5 days, then once that yolk sack runs out, they will shrivel up and basically they'll waste away and die.
So it's really important, you've got quite a narrow window of time for the chicks to learn where food and water is, and the chicks will indeed teach other chicks. If one chick sees its friend pecking at some food, it'll want it to. It's not different from little kids.
So we need to provide the chicks with light, and ideally I would give the chicks at least 23 hours of light a day up to 3 weeks of age. You can keep them on continuous lighting. It's not a problem.
But just make sure that if you're going to then put them onto natural daylight, that you gradually increase the hours of darkness. I wouldn't certainly in the winter time if you're hatching chicks at a bizarre time of year, go from 23 hours of night today to just 8 hours of light tomorrow because the chicks won't be used to it and they won't be able to eat enough food to keep them going throughout the night. You certainly wouldn't expect a newborn baby to wait 8 hours without food.
So it's really important that these chicks have got continuous lighting. It's also important to make sure they've got ventilation, to make sure that the carbon dioxide and ammonia levels don't build up too much. High levels of CO2 will cause lethargy and damage to the heart, and high levels of ammonia can cause blindness to our chicks.
I'm now going to pass you back to Richard for a 3rd poll question of the evening. Thank you. So the third question of this evening is at handling and over, sorry, at handling and over finds over 50% of the eggs are clear, what?
What is the likely cause? So at candling and over finds over 50% of the eggs are clear, what is the likely cause? Is it A, there is no problem, it is normal to have 50% infertile eggs.
B, the cockerel, C, the incubator temperature, or D, the incubator humidity. I'll just launch that now for you. Let's see if we can get a few more answer in this one.
So at candling and over fines over 50% of the eggs are clear, what is the likely cause? A, there is no problem. It is normal to have 50% infertile legs.
B, the cockerel, C, the incubator temperature, or D, the incubator humidity. Any last ones, and we'll end it there. OK, so no one has said there's a problem there's no problem.
75% have said the cockerel. No, nobody has said the incubator temperature, and 25% have said the incubator humidity. Back to you, Richard.
And of course, the majority of you're right, it would be the cockerel would be my number one target and I must apologise for the typo there, it should be owner rather than over. I now want to talk about potential problems for our young chicks, the sick chick. Now, generally, in practise, most sick chicks are either presented critically ill or freshly dead, so there's not a lot you can tend to do with them.
The key thing is prevention for future flocks of chicks. In general terms, there's either going to be one of two conditions, yolk sac infection or Starvods, and both these conditions are related to this egg yolk that's inside the chick for the 1st 5 days of age. Soy sack infection generally affects chicks about day 5.
The birds tend to be hunched up and inactive. And you tend to find that they smell awful. So these chicks will be eating and drinking initially, and they grow reasonably well for the first few days and then they suddenly stop growing.
And normally they look miserable and they really do have an awful stench to them. They're best euthanized, and if you put them to sleep, you'll see that they've got a dark fevered carcass which you can see in the photograph here. And I'll flick over to the next slide whereby you can see that you've got a yolk sack in there in the middle of the photograph that's rather congested, so the yolk sack of a healthy chick should look like a normal egg yolk that you'd buy in the shop.
Sometimes these chicks have got a very horrible . Congested liver and spleen, you can often get bronzing off the liver. But importantly, we've got to euthanize these chicks, and we've got to look at our hygiene.
Now it could be that these eggs hatched, or these chicks hatched out from dirty eggs, or it could be the case that there was a rotten egg in the incubator or the incubator hygiene was poor, so that when this chick was hatching out, its damp navel came into contact with lots of bacteria, and these bugs travelled up the navel. There is absolutely no point in giving these chicks medication. You'll never get enough antibiotic into the chick to help it recover, and all you're going to do is prolong the inevitable.
So again, I'd reiterate, ensure that only clean unwashed eggs are incubated and try and make sure that the brooding environment's clean, so our drinking water for our chicks. Now I don't generally think that dirty drinking water is going to cause a lot of yuk sack infection, but it may potentially be a contributing factor. The other common condition is starvos.
So these chicks at around 4 or 5 days of age when the yolk sack run out, tend to be small and dull with empty crops. And these chicks will often stand there at the side of the coop and they'll be complaining loudly. They tend to look really unhappy.
Now, in the past, we would suggest using electrolytes to try and stimulate these chicks to eat and drink, but unfortunately, if the chick doesn't learn to eat and drink by the time a jukesack runs out, it's never going to learn to eat and drink. So we've got to try and look at why these chicks aren't eating and drinking. Have we got enough fresh food and water available?
Have we got the correct brooding conditions? Have we got the correct temperatures? Is there enough light there to allow the chicks to see the feed and water?
You've also got to think back to your incubator. Were these embryos weak? Had the parents got a good diet to allow them to be nice and healthy, strong embryos?
Was the incubator temperature and humidity correct? If you've got incorrect environment within our incubator, you'll tend to find that these chicks are weak when they hatch, and then whenever you put them into the brooder hut, you tend to find that they're not eating and drinking normally, and they tend to waste away. Whenever we postmortem these chicks, you tend to find that what you've got is you've got a normal coloured carcass, so it looks like chicken meat that you would find within a supermarket.
You can see the chick's crop here is very empty and full of gas, and you might just about notice in the left hand photograph at the bottom left of the photo, you might see a little greenish tinge to part of the abdominal contents. And this is where you've got the gallbladder. The gallbladder is massively enlarged, where the chick hasn't eaten and it hasn't therefore emptied its gallbladder whenever it's eaten to help it digest food.
You'll also notice in these chicks, the absence of a smell, they tend to smell quite normal. There's no horrible foul stench of yuk sac infection. And the other thing is that you'll find the yuk sack has been entirely absorbed.
The chicks used up at yuk sack reserves, but again, it just hasn't learned to eat and drink. I just wanted to point out as well that compared to the chick on the right hand side, the chick on the left that's a non-starter, is rather tiny. So this chick's never eaten, and it goes to show you just how fast these chicks grow.
Both these birds are 7 days of age, and you can see the huge size difference. There's about a sort of a 50% size difference minimum. In fact, you might even say that the chick on the right is twice the size of the one on the left.
Again, if we look at this photograph, we can see in the photo that we've got these bright white lines, and these are the urate deposits in the chick's ureter where the chick hasn't drunk and it's become very dehydrated, and the uric acid has actually condensed and then participated out to cause uric acid crystals to form in the ureters, and this is a classic of a starvo. There's absolutely nothing you can do with chickens that are starve out and they're best put to sleep, but the key thing is to try and work out what the owner did wrong to generate the problem in the first place. Was it incomplete nutrition for the parent stock, the poor egg storage, or was it the incubator temperature or humidity settings, or indeed, was it something the owner did during the brooding phase?
They did not have enough light, they did not have enough chick crumb, or did they not have enough availability of drinking water? I next want to talk about a condition which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, which is coccidosis. Coxodiosis affects chickens from 2 weeks to 2 months of age, or potentially ex-battery chickens, but will focus on young birds in this evening's webinar.
It's caused by Ameria, and there's lots of different species of Ameria, each with different pathogenicities, and they've a predilection for different regions of the intestinal tract. From a backyard perspective, the only type of Ameria we're interested in in chickens is Aymeriatella, and you can see here on the right hand side of your screen, you've got the Oys on the top photograph and you've got hemorrhagic equal contents from Aimira Tella. These birds are often dull and hunched up with ruffled feathers, and that's how chickens present with any poultry disease, really.
They often have a bloody diarrhoea, and the bloody diarrhoea should look like raspberry jam. Now it's really, really important to note that there's a difference in coccidiosis droppings which look like raspberry jam, and pinky salmon coloured droppings which tend to be gut lining, which is relatively common in birds with a mild diarrhoea. But if you see raspberry jam droppings, you know you're in serious trouble with your flock.
These birds will have a pale comb and wattles due to blood loss, and in some circumstances, the birds will drop dead before they even get a chance to pass bloody droppings. It's highly contagious, and as soon as you start losing one or two birds with coxy, you need to get them treated as soon as possible. Diagnosis can be by clinical signs.
So if you see the bloody droppings and postmortem, if you were to see blood-filled ika like in the bottom right hand photo, it's pathogonomic, or you can carry out faecal oasis counts, and we would tend to say that an OEIS count of over 50,000 Oys per gramme would be indicative of a serious cocciddiosis challenge and one treatment. The problem is that whenever you start doing Oys counts, you tend to find that by the time you've got the results, the birds have either recovered or died. I'm not going to reiterate to you the life cycle of coccidiosis, but what I would point out is that whenever oocysts are passed out in the droppings, you tend to find that they are.
Inactive and they need to spoil it in order to become infective. In order to spoil it, they need warm damp conditions, and ideally they would have 25 degrees and 60 to 70% humidity. And of course in our brooding environment we provide the optimum conditions for oos to spoil it.
You can't take heat away from young chicks, and in reality, like all baby animals or baby humans, they're going to make an incredible mess. Again, we've got another photograph of some blood-filled Zika here in a broiler chicken. I wanted to mention a little bit about treating coccidiosis.
The first is to use an anti-oxidile drug, and we would tend to use amprolium, which can be given at 20 milligrammes per kilogramme body weight orally for 5 days, or you can use toltrageol at 7 milligrammes per kilogramme for 48 hours. The other thing that we need to control is the growth of secondary bacteria. When the coccidiosis damages the gut lining, you tend to find that Clostridia will take advantage of this, and they can cause septicemia and death.
So we want to use an antimicrobial such as Tylasin at 20 milligrammes per kilogramme for 5 days, or amoxicillin at 15 milligrammes per kilogramme for 5 days. But it's really important that these medications are given orally in order that they can. Act locally within the intestinal lumen.
There's no point in putting them systemically. You can support the birds with electrolytes and TLC during a coccidosis challenge, and after the antibiotics, you may wish to consider using probiotics such as Berylfriendly bacteria. And it's really important to treat all the birds within the flock.
When it comes to preventing coccidiosis, it's really important to avoid having excessive stocking densities, so I said to go for about 15 chicks per metre squared up to 3 weeks of age. Provide dry litter, try and slow the sporulation of the ooois down through adding extra shaving if needed. And after a batch of chicks are moved out, it's really important to clean the coop properly.
I think it's something that I was taught very badly in vet school, was about hygiene of chicken sheds or sheds in general. Remove all of the bedding and then wash down the coop with a detergent, and this could just be washing up liquid. You want to remove any dirt and grease so you're not diluting down a disinfectant to such a degree that it can't work.
Next, allow the coop to dry before applying a disinfectant. There's no point in going and buying an expensive disinfectant if you're going to dilute it down with water that's residual from when you've washed the coop. Make sure that you use a DEFRA approved disinfectant that is licenced to control coccidiosis.
These buoys are incredibly resistant, and if a disinfectant does not explicitly state on the label that it controls coccidiosis, you must assume that it doesn't. So one example would be Intracoca or another one would be biocyst. You can give anticoccidiles in feed such as lasalleid, and that would be in feed continuously from day old up to 12 weeks of age.
But it's really important that if you feed coccidiosis in food, that you don't give them to laying hens because it can cause issues with their eggshells and certainly not to give them to turkeys as it will cause sudden death. So turkeys are really sensitive to coccidia nets. There's a vaccine available commercially called Pacox, and there are some breeders using that, and that's administered in the first week of life orally, and it works reasonably well.
The problem is it's quite expensive and it comes in 100 dose files, so you end up having to buy the whole pack size in order to vaccinate a handful of birds. I just briefly wanted to mention a little bit about limb deformities. It's not uncommon to find lameness in birds that are bred in the backyard situation, and in almost all cases this is due to inadequate nutrition of either the parent stock or more commonly, the chick itself.
If you get bad nutrition, you'll get malformation of the limbs. Rarely it can be caused by viruses such as Rio virus, but in the majority of cases it's nutritional driven, and I would say that it's better to euthanize these birds. You can mess around with splints to try and correct angular limb deformities in chickens, and sometimes it does work, but I think it's an awful lot of work, and the bird's never going to be right at the end, and it's probably best to consider putting it to sleep.
I finally wanted to mention a massive problem for people breeding backyard poultry, and that is Marrick disease. Marex is a herpes virus and was the very first virus associated with neoplasia, so a lot of human medics are very familiar with Marrick's disease. It's shed in the dander of the feather follicles of infected adults, and that makes it very difficult to clean.
Most diseases we consider in poultry tend to be shed through the faeces, and you can spend a lot of time cleaning the floors of the coops. But because Marra is shed in the feather follicles, it carries in the wind quite a bit. Young chicks will inhale the dust from infected adults, and the Marex virus will replicate initially in the lungs, causing new problems, and then the virus will replicate within the T lymphocytes.
Initially this causes immunosuppression, and you tend to find that the birds don't grow very well. They might have recurrent diarrhoea or respiratory disease. Subsequently, after a couple of months, these infected T cells become neoplastic, and they will begin to form tumours either in the sciatic nerve or indeed in the visceral organs.
So we've got 2 chickens here on the right hand side of the silky, which is a breed heavily predisposed to Marrick disease, and on the bottom we've got a sea bright, which is again genetically very vulnerable to Marricks. Typically, signs will develop after about 12 weeks of age, up to about 6 months. By the time a bird gets to about 8 months of age, if it was going to get Marrick, it would have done.
So, we can get immunosuppression, as I already mentioned, and we can see this liver here is horribly infiltrated with lymphoma, or you can get the ataxic form whereby you get paralysis as well from the chicken has got one leg behind it and the other leg in front of it. Unfortunately, in terms of diagnosis, clinical finds are often enough, but you can confirm on postmortem examination to take a little piece of the static nerve and or the liver and sending off to a histopathologist who will confirm lymphoma. There is a PCR test available, and you can take some feather samples from a suspected case, but the problem is that this is incredibly expensive as it's only in its infancy this testing.
But I think in the next few years Marex PCR testing will become much more widely available and much cheaper. Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do in terms of treatment, and you've got to go and euthanize the affected bird. And the worry with Marrick is that if you've got one bird in the flock affected, there's a high chance that the rest of the flock will go on to develop clinical signs in the coming weeks and months.
And this is especially worrying for someone that's breeding and selling these birds, because often they're rehomed at 4 months of age, and it's after the stress of rehoming that the infection becomes apparent, and then you can end up in all sorts of legal disputes. In terms of prevention, well, hygiene's really, really important. The challenge with Marix virus is the fact that it carries in the wind and carries in the dunder.
It's really important to keep older and younger birds apart, and I cannot emphasise that enough. Stress has a huge impact on the development of Maro. So if you've got too many chicks in the coop, a very high stocking density, you will increase their predisposition.
Now we can vaccinate chicks against Marrick's disease, so there is a freeze drying vaccine available which comes in files and those files, and this will set you back about a tenner. But you must administer the vaccine the day the chicks hatch, and that means that if you've got chicks hatching over 3 or 4 days, you've got to have a new vial of vaccine for each day's worth of chicks hatching. The problem is that you've got a big needle and a small chick.
And we would tend to recommend that we use . A vaccination needle for a cat or a dog or get an insulin needle for a cat or a dog. You can inject the chicks either into the scruff of the neck, or you can inject them into the breast muscle or into the the thigh muscle, but you just got to be very, very gentle.
The vaccine's reasonably effective. However, what you tend to find is that whenever owners get Maro, they vaccinate and everything goes well for them, and they're really, really happy with you as a vet. And then a couple of years later when they've got greedy and put too many chicks in a coop or got too many chickens on site, and the vaccine can't cope with the infectious pressure on site and the owner will come back to you rather distraught, and at that point their operation is pretty much finished.
So I'm not going to hand you back to Richard for our final poll question of the evening. Oops, sorry, I couldn't get myself off, mute them. Alright, so on to our last question of the evening.
So an owner reports chicks that well grown are dying at 5 days of age. What would you say is the most likely cause? Is it Maro, coccidiosis, incorrect incubator settings, or poor hygiene in either the incubator or the eggs before setting?
So I've launched it now, so please vote. That is, the question is an owner reports chicks that well grown are dying at 5 days of age. What is the most likely cause?
A Marro, B coccidiosis, C incorrect incubator settings, or D, poor hygiene in either the incubator or the eggs before setting. So we've got a bit of a spread across the answers here. So 14% have said Marra, 29% have said coccidiosis, 14% have said incorrect incubator settings, and 43% have said poor hygiene in either the incubator or of the eggs before setting.
And of course, the, the answer is it would tend to be poor hygiene and either the incubator or one of the eggs before setting. So the chicks are too young at 5 days for Marrick and for coccidiosis. If you had incorrect incubator settings, you'd probably have very weak chicks that don't start, you get star outs, and these chicks would tend to be small and dull at 5 days, whereas the chick in the question concerned was well grown.
And normally chicks with yoksack infection would tend to grow reasonably well for the first few days before dropping back. And so hygiene tends to be our main focus. I'm gonna thank you all ladies and gentlemen for attending this evening's webinar and we've got time, I think for a few questions if anyone's got them.
Yeah, thank you very much for that, Richard. As Richard said, he has provided a comprehensive notes to go with this presentation, which you will be able to access by er logging into the webinar vet and, going to the webinar recording and you'll find the notes there. Richard has also kindly provided some additional, multiple choice questions.
So once again, you'll be able to access that via this webinar recording which will be available in the next 24 hours. I can see we've got one question already, er, but please do, pop a couple of questions in. As I say, I'm head of partnerships we webinar vet.
I don't have a veterinary background, so, please do help me out and I'll ask a couple of questions. So let's see what we've got. This question is from Joe Hollins.
Joe has said when accumulating in storing eggs prior to incubation, do they need tilting and oh, Joe's saying he's right in from the island of Saint Helena, very nice. Oh wow. Well, thanks very much, Joe, for joining us.
I imagine them our weather's always giving you a run for your money. And, in answer to your question, generally when you're storing eggs before hatching, we would tend to store them vertically upright. So there's no need to tilt them or turn them, but you can do if you want with it.
There's absolutely no necessity because at that stage, because the eggs are cool, the embryo should be latent and it's not developing. So there's no major need to do it and only adds extra workload to people's busy days. Fantastic.
We've got another question here, and this is from, Doctor Iwaoa. Apologies if I've pronounce your surname wrong there. And they've asked, is the brooding heat higher than incubating temperature?
Yes, so basically with the with the incubating temperature, it's set at 37.7 to 37.8 because the embryos obviously can't move.
However, when you've got chicks in a brooding situation, the chicks might grow at slightly different rates, and depending on the time of day and when they've eaten, they want to be able to move around. So you tend to have a Temperature variation in your brooding environment, so you'll have a really warm central area and a cool peripheral area. But as an overall average temperature, yes, the brooding temperature will be a couple of degrees on average cooler than the incubation temperature, and you're decreasing that temperature by approximately 0.3 degrees a day until the birds get down to an ambient temperature.
Fantastic, thank you very much. So if any other questions, we do have a little bit of time. What I would also like to say is, this isn't the first webinar Richard's done for us.
Richard has done a number of webinars on poultry. So if you have enjoyed tonight's webinar, please do check out the other webinars Richard has done. You can do that by going to our website, going to speakers, typing in Richard's name which is Richard Jackson.
And all the webinars that Richard has delivered for us will come up that way, so once again you'll be able to access them that way. It doesn't seem, Richard, that we've got any other questions, so what we can do, we can leave it there for tonight. All that leaves me to do is say thank you to Peter for being on hand to assist with setting, the webinar up this evening and then answering any technical questions you've had.
Thank you to yourselves for attending and pulling yourself away from the fantastic weather we seem to be having at the moment. And obviously last but not least, thank you very much to Richard for delivering such a brilliant, presentation this evening. And, I hope we can, welcome you on a on a webinar in the near future.
Thank you very much.