Julie Gauthier

As a chicken flock keeper, you’re concerned about the well-being, safety, and health of your flock. Although you can’t control everything, such as predators, pests, diseases, and injuries, you can take a proactive role to ensure your chickens thrive in your backyard.The following can help you raise healthy chickens so they can provide you with eggs and happiness for years to come.

The starting point in a chick’s life is pipping, the moment that a chick breaks through the shell and begins its entrance into the world. A healthy hatchling innately knows exactly what to do, and you shouldn’t interfere with the program.The moment for you to step in is immediately after hatching, when you have a role in preventing four common problems of the newly hatched, which are chick malformations, spraddle legs, belly button infections, and pasty vents.

Sometimes your flock may come down with ailments caused by fungal infections. Fungi aren’t plants or animals; they’re a unique, primitive category of life all their own. Mushrooms, molds, and yeast are fungi. Molds and yeasts can infect and sicken backyard chickens under the right circumstances. Brooder pneumonia (aspergillosis) Aspergillus mold organisms grow in every chicken’s environment, flourishing in damp bedding and rotten coop wood.

So what is the answer to the age-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, here, you start with the chicken and end up with an egg. Along the way, you discover the reproductive ins and outs of chickens. When chickens reach sexual maturity Young female chickens (pullets) of modern breeds, such as commercial strains of Leghorns, start laying eggs at around 18 to 21 weeks of age and are 8 months old when they reach peak egg production.

Chicken parasites are a given in most backyard coops. External parasites — lice, mites, fowl ticks, and chiggers — are the creepy-crawlies found on the outside of the chicken, so common that earlier poultry tenders didn’t even bother treating chickens for them. That said, these pests can cause anemia, damaged feathers, weight problems, poor laying, or — in young birds — death.

Some health problems are unique to broilers, the strains of chickens that have been specifically designed by people for meat production. Backyard flock keepers can purchase day-old broiler chicks and raise them, usually up to 6 to 12 weeks of age, to supply home-grown meat for a family or small farm business. Using intense selective breeding, poultry companies have created modern meat-type chicken strains that are vastly different from heritage breeds of poultry, such as their Plymouth Rock and Cornish breed ancestors.

The main job of the respiratory system of birds is to absorb oxygen and rid the body of carbon dioxide. In addition, the respiratory system also gets rid of excess heat, detoxifies some of the waste products of the body, and makes noise — most noticeably, crowing noise, much to the annoyance of our neighbors.Like humans, birds have a windpipe and two lungs, but from there, birds are distinctly unlike mammals.

After you recognize that you have a sick chicken, you need to do a physical examination to collect more clues about the problem. A chicken physical exam rarely includes taking the temperature or pulse. You just need to look closely at all areas of your chicken's body and behavior. Catch and hold the sick chicken The first step in examining your sick chicken is catching it and then holding it so you can start the examination.

You may want to review chicken anatomy before you make your first cut. As you perform the steps, jot down notes about anything that puzzles you during the necropsy. Describe the color, size, texture, and location of the things you saw in simple terms so that you can look up your findings later or describe them to your chicken health advisor.