Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Know the signs and when to take action
If your birds are to thrive, it’s important to be able to identify sick poults early on and then know how to treat them, says Liam Bell
One of the most difficult things to call when you have birds in a pen is whether they are huddled up because they are cold, because they have had a wet night and are waiting for the sun to warm them up and dry them off, or because there is actually something wrong with them. And while the temptation might be to leave them untreated, assuming that they will pick up when the weather improves, the difference between losing only one or two birds and having the whole pen go down with something always hinges on an early diagnosis and the correct treatment.
A swift diagnosis is so important. Our local vets will have a look at any birds we drop off and get back to us with an update and treatment recommendations the same day. Providing, of course, that we drop them off early enough in the morning. Some bacterial cultures can take a little longer to show up on slides, but in most cases we will know what is wrong with them and can have the water treated and the birds on the mend within 24 hours.
Dedicated practice
A dedicated poultry or gamebird vet will have a better understanding of the way release pens work — and the challenges of treating free-ranging birds that have access to alternative food and water sources — than someone who is more used to dealing with farm animals or pets. That is not to say your local vet won’t be up to it, but they do tend to have their own areas of expertise and a practice with a dedicated poultry or gamebird vet is more likely to carry a stock of the medicines needed to treat pheasants and partridges than one that deals with them only occasionally.
The vet will want to know the birds’ history. They will want to know their age, how many birds there are in the affected pen, how many birds there are in the batch if more than one pen was filled by the same delivery, where you got them from and their treatment history, if any. They will also ask you if you have any in-date medicines in stock, and whether you are adding tonic or multivitamins to the water.
Whether illnesses are the responsibility of the game farm or the shoot very much depends on the
severity and scale of the problem. How long after delivery did the issues start to arise? Personally, I think that if the birds start dying within a week of delivery, then there was something wrong with them when they turned up. If it is more than a week, it is less likely to be the game farm’s fault and more likely that they have picked something up, or that conditions within the pen have brought something on post-delivery.
A hunched-up, stilt-walking poult is a classic sign of a bird with something wrong with it. Although, by the time they get to this stage, a lot of them will be beyond saving.
The early signs of a lot of the more common illnesses and diseases are very similar. Things to look out for include loose and brightly coloured faeces, birds that are just that bit slower to move away when they are disturbed, and birds that are hunched up when viewed from a distance but which jump up and move off as normal only to stop and hunch themselves up again when they get close to cover.
Watch and learn
Sitting and watching will often give you a better feel for how the birds are doing than walking the pen and moving the birds about. Not that walking them and seeing how they move is a bad thing, and you do of course have to walk the pen to check for bodies and kills, to check the feeders and to look for things like the discoloured faeces.
Spilled feed and a reduction in food consumption are another two early warning signs, although in some cases the spilled food could be down to something as simple as a dodgy feeder spring. Birds that have intestinal problems will be hungry and want to eat, but will pick away at the food and scatter it about instead of actually swallowing it because eating it and digesting it will hurt their stomachs.
They will still drink if they are ill, which is one of the reasons why medicines are more usually added to the water. The other reason is that it is quicker to collect something from the vets and add it to the water than it is to email a prescription to a feed mill and wait for them to make and then deliver the medicated feed.
The only exception to the observation and treatment when you see the signs is the worming, which should be done as a matter of course — at least once while the poults are in the pens. We do ours when they have been in for a week or 10 days, but no earlier.
If they are done straight away, they may not have picked any worm eggs up and the dosing will, in effect, be a waste of time. If they are left until they are showing signs of being wormy, it has probably been left a little late. And a wormy bird is more
“A hunched-up, stilt-walking poult is a classic sign of a bird with something wrong”
likely to go down with something else than a bird that has been wormed, as the wormed bird will be both fitter and stronger.
There are two products on the market that are licenced for the worming of gamebirds and both appear to work equally well, although I would recommend using an in-feed wormer if the pen has an alternative water source such as a ditch or stream running through it. If birds look wormy or are starting to ‘snick’ and gape before they start getting out properly we will worm them again, but the once is usually enough.
Here’s hoping the weather is on your side when they go to wood, and that it stays relatively dry and sunny for the first week or so. It can make all the difference.