Good evening and welcome to tonight's webinar on the topic of preventative healthcare for backyard chickens. Before I start, I'd just like to do a bit of housekeeping. I'm Rich Daley.
I'm head of sales for the webinar Beth and I'm delighted to be your chair for this evening. So a little bit of housekeeping, I'm sure many of you have joined us previously, but anyone who is new, then welcome. I hope you enjoy your first webinar with us.
We want these webinars to be interactive and tonight's webinar is no different. We have 5 poll questions for you to take part in this evening, so I really would encourage you to put your answer. Don't worry, that you don't get scolded for forget.
It wrong. It's just a way of engaging, with our speaker, Richard this evening and for us to, understand sort of what level that you're operating at. So please do, you know, please do put an answer in.
We prefer people to answer and get it wrong than not to answer at all. So, at the relevant times, a little box will pop up on your screen, and it's just multiple choice and just put the question the answer that you think is correct. If for some reason, you can't the pop-up box doesn't work, you can just put A, B, C, or D.
Into the Q&A box and I'll obviously take it from there as well. Also tonight there'll be an opportunity to ask our speaker Richard questions at the end. So throughout the presentation, please do pop any questions you may have into the Q&A box and we'll get to them at the end and answer it ask Richard relevant questions.
If you do have any issues, I'm joined tonight by my colleague Dawn. Dawn is on hand to help with any technical questions you may have. So if there's any issues with the sound or with you being able to view the presentation, either pop it in the chat box, which is just, at the bottom of the screen, or alternatively send an email to office at the webinar vet.com and Dawn.
Will respond to your, queries straight away. Finally, for me, at the end of the presentation, there will be a a short survey that will pop up. Please do take only 2 minutes to complete this.
It's really useful for us to be able to develop our programme for the forthcoming year, and also I know our speakers like the feedback as well, so please do take your time to do that. Right, on with tonight's speaker. I'm delighted that we are joined once again by Richard Jackson.
Richard grew up on a turkey farm and had a keen interest in breeding and showing rare breed breeds of chickens and ducks. He graduated from Glasgow Vet School in 2010 and has worked at Saint David's poultry team ever since. He became their clinical director in 2013.
Richard has run a number of training courses and given several webinars on both management and diseases of backyard poultry. So from one Richard to another, it's over to you. Good evening everyone.
I'd like to welcome you all to this evening's webinar. And for those of you listening, I imagine quite a few of you will be jotting down lots of notes throughout the webinar, and I just wanted to point out that there are notes to go alongside this evening's webinar with in-depth coverage of all the different topics. So it's probably best to spend most of your time listening to the webinar rather than frantically trying to write down the various little bits of information.
They should all be there in the notes. There's also a quiz to go along with the notes as well. We're going to jump straight in this evening and discuss vaccination programmes for backyard poultry.
I think amongst vets there's a reticence to get involved in vaccination with backro flu for two reasons. Firstly, vets tend not to be comfortable with the different vaccines available, and equally importantly, a lot of the vaccines come in 100 dose vials, which means to vaccinate a flock of 5 or 6 birds, you're throwing away 995 doses of vaccine, and that can add up to quite a cost. I think the positive thing to remember is that if you use a killed vaccine, these vaccines can survive for up to 28 days after the vials open.
So if you're clever and you get lots of your owners bringing their birds in for vaccination during a 30 day period or 28 day period, you can get several uses for several clients out of a single vial of vaccine. When you use live vaccines, it becomes much more complicated because the vaccine will die after approximately 2 hours. There's only 3 diseases we really need to worry about in terms of vaccination of backyard flux, and they are Marex disease, infectious bronchitis, and mycoplasma galaticum.
I think aside from these 3 pathogens, there's not really much cause for vaccination of backyard flux. So with Marrick disease, I just wanted to remind you all of a few of the key features of Marrick. It's caused by a herpes virus and is shed in the feather dander of infected birds.
The feather dander and dust is then inhaled by young chicks, whereby the virus replicates in the lungs, and that doesn't cause any clinical findings at all. The virus next moves into the T lymphocytes to cause immunosuppression, so we may see diarrhoea, ill thrift, or a predisposition towards chronic infections, and that could be something like coccidiosis, for example, which we'll talk about later. Eventually, the infected T lymphocytes go on to form tumours.
So we can see in this photograph here, we've got the liver of a chicken and you can see all that white infiltrates of lymphoma. Sometimes these tumours form within the sciatic nerves and also in the ocular nerves, and that will cause the birds to become paralysed. It's really important to remember that birds after about 12 to 16 weeks of age are refractory to Marex infection.
So the virus only infects young birds up until puberty. So it's really important to think about vaccinating birds for Marex. You're only focusing on day chicks.
You've got to get that vaccine in before the chicks become exposed to the virus itself. So it's no good vaccinating birds at a weaker age if they've been exposed to the virus in the 1st 2 or 3 days. So for all intents and purposes, if you cannot vaccinate birds at the old from Marex, you might as well forget about it.
The vaccine is administered intramuscularly or subcutaneously, and that can go under the skin of the neck, into the breast muscle, or into the thigh muscle. Now it all sounds rather straightforward, but one of the problems is you've got a tiny day old chick, particularly a bantam, and a relatively large needle and syringe, so it's incredibly easy to damage the chick. I would always recommend if you're vaccinating chicks for Marricks that you use a cat insulin shring and needle that tends to work quite well.
The vaccine unfortunately is live, which means it's quite vulnerable to desiccation, and it comes in 1000 dose vials, but it's relatively cheap and cheerful. So what you'd find is that a 1000 dose vial would typically be up to 15 pounds. So even if you have to throw away 990 of the doses, it's still relatively cost effective.
Some owners will have chicks hatching over 3 or 4 days, and you will need to vaccinate each day's hatch individually, and that will mean having a vial of vaccine for each day's hatch. One of the key things about Marrick's vaccine, as with the vaccine from any other pathogens, is that the vaccine only works if there's good management. So you need good hygiene and the correct stocking density for the birds.
If you've got a dirty holding and you vaccinate the chicks, eventually the field challenge will overcome the vaccine. But if administered correctly and there is good management, the vaccine works incredibly well. The next pathogen We want to think about vaccinating birds against is mycoplasma galaepticum.
So this is a respiratory pathogen and causes signs such as a naso ocular discharge. As we can see in the photographs here, we've got some pale eggs with wrinkly shells, and that can be another feature of mycoplasma galaepicum. It is spread via the faecal or sorry, it's not spread via the faecal route, it's spread via nasal and respiratory secretions via vertical transmission and through mating as well.
Now the easiest option to control mycoplasma in backyard flocks is to use a killed vaccine, and we would recommend giving 2 jabs 4 weeks apart as an initial programme and then following it up with an annual booster. Now in vet school, we're all taught that we really only ought to vaccinate uninfected animals, but we would also recommend vaccinating infected birds, particularly breeding stock for mycoplasma galaticum, as it will reduce vertical transmission through to the chicks. The next pathogen that we want to think about vaccinating birds against is infectious bronchitis virus.
So like mycoplasma, infectious bronchitis can cause respiratory signs. It can cause poor quality eggshells, but also it can predispose birds to peritonitis, and we can see here in this photograph we've got a dead battery hen with a belly full of puss, and that can be predisposed to because infectious bronchitis damages the reproductive tract, allowing E. Coli to come in through the vent.
And it can also damage the respiratory tract, allowing E. Coli to come in through the airways to cause this peritonitis. And the problems with infectious bronchitis, or the main problem is that it's a coronavirus and as such, it mutates frequently, and that means there's lots of different strains of it.
Again, as with Mycoplasma galaepticum, we would recommend using 2 killed jabs 4 weeks apart, followed by an annual booster. We wouldn't recommend vaccinating birds under 4 weeks of age, either with the infectious bronchitis or with the mycoplasma killed the vaccine because it's quite hard on the bird. Now the good news about the killed vaccine is that it is multivalent, so it contains lots of different strains of infectious bronchitis, and as a bonus, it contains antigens for Newcastle disease and for avian rhinotracheitis.
And it's worth pointing out that there have been outbreaks of Newcastle disease in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in the last few months. And using the killed vaccine programme for infectious bronchitis works extremely well for most flocks. The only time that we see a problem is where you've got a very high field challenge on a holding, and the owners are breeding lots of batches of young chicks, and sometimes the virus can infect the young chicks before they get to 4 weeks of age, in which case you're a bit late with your kill the vaccine.
So what we would tend to recommend in these cases is that the chicks are given a live vaccine via eye drop. The problem with it is that the live vaccines are monovalent, so you've got to give lots of different live vaccines about 10 days apart to cover all the common strains. So it's a bit of a faff.
It ends up being quite expensive, and I think if you've got someone with a huge infectious bronchitis problem. And it's not being controlled through killed the vaccine. It may be worth contacting us here at St.
David's or at Chicken vet just to discuss it because it becomes rather complicated and you need to be really careful with putting a programme together. But for 99% of bacter flocks using the Killed infectious bronchitis vaccine and the Killed Mycoplasma vaccine work extremely well. So I'm gonna pass you back to Rich for our first poll question.
Thank you, Richard, so I'm just gonna launch the first poll question. And the question is, what is the best option to protect show birds against Mycoplasm galleysepticum? Is it A, a live vaccine and then a killed 14 weeks later, followed by an annual booster with a live vaccine?
Is it B, a live vaccine, then a killed 14 weeks later, followed by an annual booster with a killed vaccine. Is it C, a killed vaccine, then a second killed 14 weeks later, followed by an annual booster with a live vaccine? Or is it D, a killed vaccine, then a second killed 14 weeks later, followed by an annual booster with a killed vaccine.
So 4 options there. I probably need a little bit longer for you to read through them again because the options are quite similar. But please do say put your thoughts down.
I'll just give you another 30 seconds to do that. So once again, what is the best option to protect show birds against mycoplasm gaysepticum? I can see that you haven't voted yet, so I would encourage you just to er put your votes down.
OK, I'll just end the voting in 5 seconds, give anyone a last second chance to vote. OK, I wouldn't do that. Right, so the answering and 100% of respondents have said, a killed vaccine, then a second killed 14 weeks later, followed by an annual booster with a killed vaccine.
Is that correct, Richard? That's correct, Rich, and then well done to everyone for getting that right. I promise you that the rest of the poll questions are a lot more straightforward with a lot less potential answers there.
So well done to everyone. The key thing is that we want to stick to the kill vaccines where absolutely possible. We're now going to move on to coccidiosis of backyard chickens and just to give you a brief overview of coxy in backyard flocks, as with all species, it's caused by a protozoa aimmeria, and there's only one species that's of significant in backyard flocks, and that is Ayeriatella.
And it's really easy to remember, it only infects young birds up to about 12 weeks of age, and it causes bloody droppings. And I mean proper hemorrhagic diarrhoea, and it looks like raspberry jam in the bedding. Some owners were wrongly describe orangey mucus droppings as being coxy, but these are not coxy.
Proper coccidiosis is literally droppings made of raspberry jam. Additionally, it's important to remember that in some cases the birds bleed into their Zika so fast that they die before they have the chance to produce bloody droppings. So an unexpected issue with mortality in young birds up to about 3 months of age would generally tend to indicate coccidosis, and the postmortem examination will rapidly reveal whether or not that's the case.
And you can see in this photograph here. That what looks like two black puddings are literally ika filled with clotted blood. If you're getting coccidiosis in birds over approximately 3 months of age, then I would be thinking of immunosuppression, i.e.
Marrick's disease. And coxy is very contagious. If you've got mortality due to coccidiosis in one bird in a flock, the chances are the rest are on their way to being infected and likely to be dying.
When it comes to control strategies for coccidiosis, there's 4 main methods we can use. We can use infeed coccidiostats, strategic treatments with totrayol, vaccination, or faecal oocyst counts, and we can see here in the photograph we've got 3 coccidiosis oocysts. Now, whenever we think of doing UI counts, we would generally recommend the owners do them twice a week between 3 weeks and 3 months of age.
And from a sort of our vet school training we thought that we should try and have an accurate diagnosis before going in with a potential treatment or preventative. The issue is that at roughly 15 pounds per sample, if owners are going to do 2 samples a week between 3 weeks and 12 weeks, it works out to be a heck of a lot of money. So for many small flocks, it's not cost effective to do these OSI cunts.
If owners do want to be done in the UA assist count route, then anything over 50,000 UA assists per gramme warrants treatment. So that UAI count has to get very high before you get concerned. And it's really important if owners are taking faecal samples either for coccidiosis oous counts or for worm egg counts that they take actual fresh faeces and not litter because otherwise it'll skew your coccy counts.
And I should also point out that these are done using the McMaster method. Irrespective of which option is used to control oxidosis, good cleaning and disinfection is paramount. We'll go into cleaning this infection later on in this evening's webinar, but it's really important to remember that most disinfectants do not destroy coccidios oocysts.
And if a disinfectant does not explicitly state on the label it is licenced against coccidiosis, then you must assume that it doesn't control it. Additionally, overstocking birds can increase the challenge to young chicks triggering disease, and a lot of breeders sometimes get rather greedy. They put 10 chicks in a coop one year and then the following year they think I'll squeeze in 15, and that can put unacceptable pressure on the birds themselves.
So onto the infeed coccidiastat. Well, the one that you tend to find in backyard flocks is layosid, and it's a ophore coccidiostat, and what it does is it affects the iron balance within the parasite causing it to die. And that is sold under the trade name of Avatech.
You feed it in your chick crumb from day 0 right up to 12 weeks of age. Now the good point about Avatech or La So Lucid is that it's relatively cheap and easy to get hold of. The downsides are if you feed it to laying hens, it will damage the eggshell quality, and if you feed it to turkeys, they will drop dead and I properly mean that I've seen it so many times.
One of the problems that you get with bay flocks is sometimes the owners will have multiple edges on site and in the same pen, and they only want to buy one batch of food, so that can present a problem. But for serious breeders who are hatching anywhere between 20 and 100 birds a year, I would seriously suggest looking at buying food with lassoloidd already mixed into it. The next option is strategic use of Toltraure rule, and that is sold under the trade name of Baycocks made by Bayer.
And that should be given 48 hours per week, from 3 weeks of age up to 12 weeks of age, and that is given at 1 mL of Bayco for every litre of drinking water. It's cheap and cheerful, but it's a bit of a faff to use, and you tend to find that most owners don't know how much water their birds are drinking, which can make dosing it a bit of a challenge. The other issue with bacocks is that it's not licenced for birds producing eggs for human consumption.
Therefore, if you've got multiple ages of birds in a holding, you've got to make sure you're not feeding it to any chickens that may be laying eggs. The third option is to use vaccination, and the coccidosis vaccine available is called Pacoxx 5, and that's made by MSD. And it's a live vaccine and it's got to be administered during the first week of life.
We can either deliver it via eyedrop, which is quite surprising for a parasite that's transmitted via the faecal oral route, or alternatively, we can advise the birds as well. The vaccine contains attenuated strains of Imuranella. But these strains need to cycle 2 to 3 times within the bird to generate sufficient immunity.
So the bird's got to pass the vaccine strain of coccidiosis out in the droppings and reinfect itself. The problem with coccidiosis in general is that the oocysts and the droppings are not infective until they sporulate. In order to spoil it, assists require warm, moist conditions.
Most owners will provide their chicks with heat because otherwise they'd die, but the moisture content of the litter can vary tremendously. So in the middle of winter, we might have perfect conditions for ooy sporulation, but this time of year where we've had a particularly warm summer, you might find the litter is very dry and the oocysts don't spoil it, so the birds don't get adequate exposure to the vaccine strain to develop immunity. To my mind, coccidiosis vaccination is so easy to mess up and it's relatively expensive.
The vaccine comes in 1000 dose vials and the vaccine isn't cheap. So I would tend to steer owners away from vaccination. I'm going to pass you back to Rich for our second full question of the evening.
Thank you. So, our second poll question, I'll put it up now for you. And it is, which is the best option for breeders to control coccidiosis in young chickens?
Is it to A, vaccinate, B, administer total. I'm gonna administer Totalzoil. 2 days per week from 3 to 12 weeks, feed in feed for coccidiostats between day old and 12 weeks, or carry out weekly Oasy counts and treat if the Oasis levels exceed 50,000 OPG.
So it give you 30 seconds just to decide which one of those you're gonna go for A, B, C, or D. OK, I can see about 50% of you have voted, so I'll just give you another 1520 seconds for the last few stragglers to put their votes in. So once again, which is the best option for breeders to control coccidiosis in young chickens?
Get any more votes? OK I'll end it there. Right, we have a bit more of a split on this one.
We have 20% of said A vaccinate. 20% have said B. And 60% have said C feed and feed coccidiostats between day old and 12 weeks, and no one has gone for option D.
Excellent. Well, I think the majority of you went with the answer I would have given, which is option C for the infeed cultidiusstats, but I think it's fair to say that in a situation like this, there's probably not necessarily a right and wrong answer. And yes, you could vaccinate or you could use Tultrazolol 2 days per week.
There's pros and cons to the different options, but I think the cheapest and easiest option would be the infeed coxidiostat. We're now going to move on to look at worming control in backyard flocks. The main group of worms that we want to control in backyard chickens are the roundworms or nematodes, and we're looking at Ascaridia gala, and this worm lives in the jujunum.
It's several centimetres in length and is the thickness of the pencil lead. We've got Hetericchus gainarum, which lives in the ika. This worm is approximately 2 centimetres in length and the thickness of a pencil lead.
And finally, we've got lots of different species of capilllaria, which is your hair worm, and each species has a different predilection site within the digestive tract. All these species of worms can cause ill thrift and sometimes diarrhoea. Capillaria can actually be fatal to young birds.
What it does is it buries into the mucosa, causing haemorrhage and necrosis, and can cause such severe inapetence that the bird wastes away. It's always important to remember that Hetericus gainorum can carry the protozoal parasite Histomonas, which causes black lead in chickens, leading to sudden death. I've also put in the slide gapeworm syamma trachea, which many vet students remember from university as the worm that's constantly having sex.
So the male and female worm are constantly conjoined in the trachea. And you'll get a plug of these worms which will block the trachea of the bifurcation causing dyspnea, and in many cases asphyxiation and death. Gaworms are incredibly rare in backyard poultry and tend to be a feature of game birds and of peafowl.
So for controlling worms, we've got a number of different options. I think it's really important to remember that apart from gapeworm. All of the species of worms that infect chickens can complete their life cycle directly, so they can infect both housed and free range hens.
Gapeworm requires an intermediate host, usually a slug or a snail, to complete its life cycle. One option is to routinely worm your birds every 3 months, and whenever I was going to vet school, this was the standard advice for most animals. But I think we're all more and more aware of potential amplementtic resistance, and we're trying to be steered away from this through things like scalps.
I think for backyard flocks, there's no proven resistance to either the bends and midazos licence for controlling worms, but these products are relatively new and poultry, and I'm not sure we've had them long enough in the market to see if resistance does develop. We've tended in veterinary college to be steered towards carrying out more meg cunts using the McMaster method every 3 months. And generally speaking, this works quite well.
The big question I'm always asked by owners and by vets is how many worm eggs is too many. The simple answer is if there's any capillary eggs, the hareworm eggs, then we need to worm the birds irrespective of whether there's 1 egg per gramme of faeces or 1000. For all the other species of worms, if the egg count exceeds 400 eggs per gramme of faeces, then we want to deworm the flock.
My only hesitation with where Meg counts again is the owner's sampling technique. They need to take fresh VC samples and not have any litter in the sample, otherwise it dilutes down the worm eggs and you get a false result. There are 2 licenced wormers for backyard flocks, flubendazole and Fenbendazole.
Flubendazole should be given as a seven-day course, either in the feed or in the water. It can be bought pre-mixed, which is probably the easiest and cheapest way of doing it. That way you know that the worm is mixed in at the correct inclusion rate.
You can buy a home mixed version, so a 1% powder of flubendazole, and then you mix that yourself at home. The issue with the 1% powder is, I'm never convinced owners mix it correctly and evenly throughout the food, and it's relatively expensive as well. The in water flubendazole tends to be an emulsion, and it settles out of the drinking water rather rapidly.
So if owners want to use flubendazole, I would always recommend to buy the feed with the wormer already mixed in, and that's available for many feed merchants and local cooperatives. If owners wish to use fenbendazole, that is a five day course in drinking water, and that mixes very well. So unlike flubendazole, fenbendazole is relatively water soluble.
Both products have got a zero egg withdrawal for chickens. So it means that they're totally safe. I also just wanted to mention a few other points about worming backyard flocks.
There's lots of herbal products on the market which have varying claims on parasite control. And I think each of us in the audience will have different thoughts on how effective herbal preparations are as romantics. All I would say to you is that if you want to licence nonalmenttic like fenbendazole, you've got to prove it's both safe and it's efficacious.
If you wish to licence or to get a herbal preparation licence, you only have to prove that it is safe. The other key point with controlling worms in backward flocks is range management. Some owners will have static ranges and others will have mobile arcs where they move the coop around and the chickens have got fresh ground.
A lot of the worm eggs can be carried by earthworms, and earthworms can live up to 10 years. So in theory, unless the owner can guarantee you that they're not going to come back to the same patch of ground within 10 years, I'm not entirely sure how effective moving the range area really is. The things we would recommend are to keep the grass short as UV light hitting the surface of the soil will destroy worm eggs.
If the owners regularly rotivate the pasture, they will bring up these worm eggs to the surface of the soil, allowing UV lights to destroy them. And also applying lime to the range is anecdotally thought to help reduce pathogen contamination, including worms, but I should point out there's no science behind that. One advantage, of course, of moving the range area regularly is that the birds have access to fresh, clean grass, and it does reduce their exposure to mud and other pathogens.
So I'm not sure moving the coop to new pasture actually reduces worms, but I think it will improve bird health overall. I'm gonna pass you back to Rich for our 3rd full question of this evening. Thank you, Richard.
So our 3rd question in the evening is launching now, and it is, at what levels do worm eggs need to be at before deworming is warranted? So at what levels do worm eggs need to be at before deworming is warranted? Couple of people straight in there before you even get to read out the options.
Is it A? Any worm eggs warrant deworming? Is it B, if the total count exceeds 400 eggs.
Gramme. Is it C if the total count exceeds 400 eggs, or if any capillary eggs are found, or is it D if the total count exceeds 400 eggs or if any gate worm eggs are found? So A, B, C, or D.
OK, so at what levels do worm eggs need to be at before deworming is warranted? A, B, C, or D. Give me 5 more seconds for any last strugglers.
And I'll end it there. OK, so we've got 17% have said any worm eggs warrant deworming, and the other 83% have gone for C if the total count exceeds 400 eggs or if any capillary eggs are found. And the answer is C.
So basically any capillary eggs warrant deworming, and if the total count exceeds 400 eggs per gramme of faeces of all the other species of worms combined, then we want to worm the flock. We're now going to move on to red mites, which are a big issue at the moment with the weather being very warm. Red mites are incredibly common in backcode flocks, and I reckon that probably 90 to 100% of backcode flocks have got red mites present to some degree.
They're nocturnal, so we need to think of them as the vampires of the poultry world. They don't like bright light, so during the day they hide in the cracks and crevices in the coup, and at night they emerge a pale grey colour. They climb onto the birds and suck their blood.
And as they do so, the mites take on this bright red appearance which you can see in the photograph. Eventually, the mites turn black and then brown as they begin to digest their blood meal. Think about red mites like you do fleas.
They spend most of their time off the host rather than on the host, which makes red mite a bit different from most parasites in backyard flocks. You may not know that you've got an infestation in your coop because many owners don't look at their birds during the night. But the mites can be seen with the naked eye.
The life cycle can be as short as 10 days in warm weather. So with the extreme heat that we've had over the last few weeks, we've seen red mite explosions on a number of holdings. And red mites are tricky little characters to get rid of because they can survive two years without feeding, which is a hell of a long time.
So what do the red mites do? Well, as you can imagine, if they're sucking the chickens' blood, they're causing them to be restless. So you might find the bird's feathers are a bit untidy.
The birds lay fewer eggs or smaller eggs. Eventually, the mites were called anaemia, which would be characterised by a pale comb and wattles. Sometimes when the chickens are laying their eggs first thing in the morning, if there's mites around their vent, then the mites can be squished up against the surface of the egg and you get little tiny blood spots on the egg.
Please remember that if you've got high burdens of red mites, they can suck so much blood from the chicken that they cause sudden death. So mites are not innocuous. Additionally, red mite can carry other pathogens such as mycoplasma, E.
Coli, and salmonella, so there's certainly a force to be reckoned with. If red mites are hungry enough, they will feed on mammals such as cats and dogs, and even on people. So the problem with red mites is that most owners don't know that they've got a problem.
And in the good old days, it was recommended that owners got a torch and went out into the coop in the middle of the night. But a lot of chicken owners tend to be fair weather keepers, and they only want to go out to their chickens during the daytime. In the past, we recommended that owners got children's drinking stalls and attached them to the perch with sellotape.
After the mites had fed, they would crawl into the straws, and then the next morning it was recommended that the owners blew in the straw onto a sheet of paper or onto a tissue to see if there's any red mite present, and it was really important that you didn't suck on the straws. However, there's been a sort of a recent media campaign to ban plastic straws, and what we've moved on to is designer mic traps. So we can see in the photograph here we've got two red mic traps, and these are about the size of a matchbox, and they're attached onto the perch with cable ties, and inside there is sticky paper with a little grid.
And the idea is that after the mites are fed, they crawl into the trap and they become stuck to the paper. And this does two things. Firstly, it traps and kills the mites, but more importantly, it allows owners to count them and monitor the mite population over time.
And these mite traps are only a couple of pounds to buy, so I think they're quite good value for owners. There's a whole plethora of treatments for red mite on the market. Probably the most widely used is mite powder, which is volcanic ash or diatomaceous earth.
And this grinds on the waxy surface of the red mite, and through osmosis, the moisture sucked out of the mite, so they dehydrate and die. Red mite powder is incredibly safe and easy to use and should be applied liberally to nest boxes and to dust bathing areas. Mite powder is excellent for preventing red mites or for controlling low levels of mites, but in the face of a large infestation, you might find it's not enough on its own.
One way of controlling red mites, which I found with one of our clients was to use a cat litter tray mixed with kids play sand, and they've also got mite powder in there. So when the chickens went into dust bag, they were getting the mite powder in through their feathers. The other mainstay of red mite treatment in bicode flocks is poultry shield.
Poultry shield is a poultry disinfectant and it's a Quaternary ammonium compound. It's safe and cheap and it's non-toxic. And in addition to being a disinfectant, it also has a detergent action, so it's quite good if there's some organic matter present.
And poultry shield is rather effective against low levels of red mite. The other option for red mite control in chickens is rather than treating the environment is to target the actual chicken itself. And we would tend to think about using ivermectin.
So ivermectin 1% drops can be applied to the back of the neck of the bird at 1 drop for every 500 grammes body weight, and this should be repeated two weeks later to kill any mites that have been in the egg form when the first treatment was applied. Because ivermectin is off label and backyard chickens, we must apply a minimum of a 7-day egg withhold and a minimum of 28 day meat withhold. But if you look on the cascade, it also states that you've got to take the animal's physiology into account.
And unfortunately, birds tend to hold about 14 days' worth of egg yolks in their ovaries. So I would always say if you're treating chickens off label, to use a minimum of a 14 day egg withhold rather than a 7 day egg withhold. And obviously, if you're treating these birds twice, 2 weeks apart, you're going to be without eggs for a month that you can use.
Frontline or fipronil in the past was commonly used in backyard flocks, but you may be aware that there was a media scandal back last year in the Netherlands whereby people were using Frontline in commercial poultry. And unfortunately, fipronil is listed in the EU table of allowed substances as a product that is forbidden to be used in food producing animals. And we need to be very clear, even if you've only got 1 or 2 pet chickens, they are legally defined as food producing animals.
So frontliner fipronil is banned for use in chickens. Some of your clients may be organic, they want to leave the good life, and they've got an allotment with some chickens on it, and they don't want to use any chemicals or carrocis. So we've also got the option of using predator mites, and these mites simply eat the red mite.
They come in little tubes that you cable tie onto the perch. And the predator mites will kill the red mites quite effectively. The issue is that you've got to establish a relationship and a balance between the predators and the prey.
If you've got too many predator mites, they'll eat all the red mites too fast, and the predator mites will die. However, if you don't have enough of the predator mites, then they won't be able to kill the red mite as quickly as they're breeding. These predator mites do not really reproduce successfully in backyard coops.
The problem with predator mites is that you mustn't use them with any other mite treatments. So when trying to put together a mite control programme for backyard keepers, I would say for low levels of red mites, we want to remove all the bedding from the coop. We want to wash the coop down with a detergent, and that could simply be washing up liquid to remove all the dirt and grease and organic matter, which may inactivate your poultry shield or mite powder.
Allow the coop to dry. Then apply your poultry shield. Allow that to dry and then liberally apply my powder to the nests, dust bathing areas, and perches.
Whenever rebedding a coupe that's had an issue with red mites, always choose wood shavings rather than straw, as straw provides additional hiding places for the red mite. For owners where they have moderate to high levels of red mite, in addition to poultry shields and mite powder, I would use ivermectin on the chickens themselves. And this process needs repeating every 2 to 3 weeks until you get on top of the red and white problem.
It's really important to monitor red mite burdens weekly. And remember that it's an ongoing war rather than a single battle. And please, please, please remember that especially in hot weather, red mites can kill the chicken due to anaemia.
I'm now going to hand you back to Rich for a 4th full question of the evening. Thank you, Richard. So our 4th question of the evening is, which is the most appropriate option for a keeper who has an issue with the low level of red mite?
Is it a predator mites along with mic powder? Is it B, clean the coop with poultry shield and then use the mic powder? Is it C, treat the birds with ivermectin drops, or is it D, treat the birds with ivermectin drops and use mic powder on the coop.
So that's A, B, C, or D. OK, see about half of you've responded. Don't worry.
If you get any of the questions wrong, you will still be able to claim your CPD points, so, it won't affect that. So if you're not too sure, you can still have a guess. We've got, is it A predator mites along with mic powder, B clean the coop with poultry shield, then use mic powder.
C, treat the birds with mectin drops, or D, treat the birds with ivermectin drops and use mic powder on the coop. OK, well, I think that's all the answers we're gonna get, so I'll just close the poll in there. And we have it unanimously that 100% of respondents have said B clean the coop with poultry shield, then use mic powder.
Well done everyone. That's the correct answer. We're now going to finish up this evening's webinar with a few little bits and pieces.
The first one was just to remind everyone that on cleaning and disinfection off coops in general, when you don't have a massive red mic issue, we really want to be doing it every 3 months. As I've said, with red mite control, we want to wash the coop down with washing up liquid to remove dirt and grease. It's no good buying an expensive disinfectant and having it inactivated by organic matter.
Similarly, you want to allow the coop to dry between washing it and disinfecting it. If you apply disinfectant to a wet surface, you're going to end up diluting it beyond its efficacious dose rate. And please remember that if coccidiosis has been an issue, ensure an anti-coccidile disinfectant has been selected.
Remember, if a disinfectant doesn't explicitly state on the label that it controls coccidiosis, then we must assume that it doesn't. We then want to allow the coop to dry and apply my powder if necessary. It should go without saying that owners should provide the chickens with fresh, clean water daily.
You can see in this photograph on the top right of the screen that we've got a range of poultry drinkers. And one of the problems with these drinkers is that they tend to hold enough water to last a flock of chickens a couple of days. Well, especially in this weather.
The drinkers can harbour a lot of bacteria because the bugs will breed really fast, especially if the birds are given vitamins. Additionally, sunlight getting into them drinkers tends to allow algae to form, which can be harmful to chickens. So really the water needs replacing or replenishing every day.
I wanted to just mention a little bit about gut health of backro flocks. It's really important to remember that chickens really only need a commercially milled layer pellet or mash, and we need to feed chickens chicken food, ducks, duck food, and turkey's turkey feed, as they all have different quantities of protein. Additionally, with chickens, chick crumb will have a very high level of protein and a low level of calcium.
Conversely, layers pellets will have a high level of calcium and a lower level of protein. And if you get that wrong, you can cause diarrhoea in the birds. And you can see here that this chicken in the photograph has got faecal matter adhered around her vent where she's got some diarrhoea, and this is known as vent pasting.
Some owners will opt to give their birds apple cider vinegar, and what this does is it acidifies the gut, and that encourages beneficial acid-loving bacteria such as lactobacillus to reproduce, whilst inhibiting the growth of harmful pathogenic bacteria which are alkaline loving, such as Clostridia, E. Coli, and salmonella. Probiotics are often vindicated for use in lots of animals and indeed people, and I've got mixed feelings of probiotics.
The biggest niggle I have in my mind is that the probiotics are designed to live in the intestine, which pH varies anywhere between 5 and 7, depending on the region of the gut. But in order to get to the gut, the probiotic must pass through the stomach with a pH of 3, and I'm not entirely convinced that a lot of the bacteria in the probiotics will survive going through the stomach. Where I think probiotics are useful, are if you've got young bale chicks whose stomachs haven't quite acidified enough, or if you've got a bird whereby it's been in a prolonged course of antimicrobials and you've wiped out all the natural flora.
Another situation whereby probiotics are useful or in cases of sour crop where you want to displace the yeast growing in the crop with good bacteria. So that can be quite a beneficial situation. For commercial poultry, the most widely sold probiotic is Avigard, which is made by Lalamond, and they've got a backyard version known as Beryl's friendly bacteria.
And this contains over 400 different species of commensal bacteria found in the intestine of a healthy bird. I'm now going to pass you back to Rich for our 5th and final poll question of the evening. OK, so our final question in the evening is which product must never be used to treat red mite?
Is it A creoso, B, ivermectin, C mic powder, or D fipronil? So, let's see if we can get a 100% respondence for this last question. Which product must never be used to treat red mite?
Is it A, creoso, B, ivermectin, C, mite powder, or D fipronil? Mm OK, any last stragglers before we close the polling? Just remind as well if you do have any questions for Richard, please do pop them in the Q&A box and I will be asking them to him shortly.
Right, so a bit of a split one on this. We've had 29% of respondents have said creosote, 14% have said ivermectin, and 57% have said fipronil. So the answer is fipronil, which must never be used in food producing animals including micro chickens.
Creo so interestingly, there's no Documentation or legislation which states we shouldn't use it in backyard poultry on the coup. And that's it from me this evening, ladies and gentlemen. If anyone's got any queries, I'll do my best to answer them.
OK, thank you very much for that, Richard, a very interesting talk you given there and some really useful hints and tips, for those who are listening tonight, to be able to implement and also advise their customers. So as Richard says he's happy to take any questions. So please do pop any questions you may have in the Q&A box, and I will put them to Richard shortly.
Also, just as a reminder, as Richard said at the top of the webinar, he has provided very kindly provided us with unique comprehensive notes from this presentation. So they will be available after tonight's webinar. They'll also be, will be attached to the recording on our website so you can log in and obtain them from there.
Also, Dawn has very kindly put the link to tonight's survey in the chat box. So you can just click on that link and that will take you through to the short survey. OK.
Let's see. So, So we've got a question from Sue. Sue's a regular attendee.
Good to see you on again today, Sue. She first says excellent talk, very interesting and informative. Off the topic, should any preventive action be taken in pet birds?
So I didn't quite understand the question there, Rich. So she's just saying she's going off topic a little bit, but er she's saying should obviously in cases . And she said earlier that you've talked about, should any of those, any preventative actions be taken in pet birds?
Have you got any, sort of view on that? Mhm. I, I think with a lot of pet birds, they tend to require quite specialist attention, and I know that they do suffer from protozoal parasites and from worms as well.
So I think certainly regular faecal examinations are quite useful in pet birds. They do tend to get ectoparasites. However, they tend not to suffer from red mites, so it's not a major issue in them.
And I think that the key points about diet and cleaning, disinfecting the cages are really important as well, and they apply to all species, not just backyard chickens. Fantastic. Thank you.
Well, just having a look, doesn't seem to be any more questions. So I think we must have, covered everything in the presentation, Richard. So all it leaves me to do is to say, thank you very much to Dawn for helping out this evening and being on hand to, for the technical side of things.
Thank you to yourselves for attending tonight's webinar. Obviously we hold these webinars for the farmer related topics on a monthly basis, so, please do tune in again. At the beginning of September for our next one.
And obviously finally and most of all, thank you to Richard for providing a fantastic webinar this evening with also, excellent and in-depth notes that go with this. So, thank you very much for that, Richard, much appreciated. You're very welcome and thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for listening to this evening's webinar.
Thank you very much. Good night.