Pullets Sneeze/cough

From: Tapper (OldNO-SPAMGods_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/29/04 

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 13:39:16 GMT

Hello all! It's nice to be back. I've had endless ISP problems. Hope all
are well. Here's my latest news:

So... I was down to 2 hens and 7 ducks and suffering from "empty coop"
syndrome, but because of my work schedule I couldn't buy chicks and brood
them properly: I needed older birds. I saw an ad in the paper from a local
horse farm who was raising poultry for auction. It was just a few hours
before the auction, so I zipped over and bought 10 pullets, a cockrel and
three slightly older hens. I didn't have time to disinfect my coop before
I brought them home, but I did a bit of a clean out while they were in the
car, and disinfected all waterers, feeders, nests, etc. Today is bright
and sunny and I'm about to do a thourough hose out/disinfect of everything.
A friend of mine from Ireland said that her mother always spread garden lime
on the floors and in the nestboxes. Is this OK?

The horse farm was relatively clean; there were 200+ birds (about 3 months
old) in each stable. They were climbing all over each other, but no
pecking. Their combs were so pale! I don't think they had ever been in the
sun. He also had some older birds, maybe 7 months old. The older ones
were raised for a petting zoo and had just been returned to him. All of the
birds I took seemed healthy, except one of the older birds had scaly legs.
I felt sorry for her; she'd had the tip of her beak removed (not too much,
just the hook), so I took her. All of the birds that I rejected from the
petting zoo were missing one or more toes.

I segregated the new birds for two weeks to make sure they were healthy.
Everyone seemed fine.

One irritating thing was that they seemed to be a family of egg-eaters.
Once they were integrated they cleaned out one of my nesting duck's nests!
And they'd lay and eat the egg right then. I bought some eggs, boiled them
and fed it to them, and the egg eating slowed down, so I decided it was a
nutrition issue. I put out oyster shells, fed them cottage cheese and
switched to a different brand of feed, and now the egg eating seems to have
stopped.

Anyhoo, now it's been about 5 weeks and some of them have developed a wet
cough and sneeze. How worried should I be about this rattling cough?
Maybe they have an allergy or something, or they're just still adjusting to
a free range environment. I've been giving them extra fruit and greens and
otherwise they are happy and healthy.

Sorry this was so long!

    --Pat