Rest In Peace Pepper: The Sad Tale of a Silkie Chicken Infested wit...

My beloved silkie chicken Pepper died last night after a several week struggle with a mite infestation caught way too late. I didn’t know it was a possible issue at the time and just as her feathers started to look really nice John noticed she wasn’t very energetic, actually was downright lathargic. I brought her inside, asked some Facebook groups and we quickly found that she was infested with mites.

We prefer not to use chemical pesticides so I started doing what I could the natural way. The area around her face was the worst and I was treating that with an essential oil blend mixed into apple cider vinegar. I bathed her in blue dawn and had her dust bath once dry in wood ash several times. Treated her with VetRX and garlic oil. Nothing really worked.

As per the advice of a friend John got some insecticide for her, which we coated her in nearly a week ago now. Since then she’s been basically sleeping, only drinking occasionally then not at all unless I made her.

Mites weaken a bird to the point where it stops eating and drinking, then it dies. She’d long since given up both and we were taking her out between 5-10 times a day to give her water, honey and anything else we’d come up with that she might like. We tried child vitamins and yesterday we tried essentially a pedialite competitor.

Just before the sun set and the rain started John noticed she was dead. I’d just tried to give her food and water maybe 10 minutes before hand and from what we can tell she might have drowned on that. Whatever it was she wasn’t alive, although clearly still warm.

I immediately took her outside with a shovel and dug her a spot under a big boulder just before the rain. Anyone that’s tried to just dig into the dirt here with a shovel knows that task isn’t easy as it consists primarily of rock, clay and quartz but the fact that I was devastated and upset with myself made me turn the shovel into a sort of pickaxe to dig what is likely the deepest hole I’ve dug here. To this date, Pepper is the only chicken I’ve gone about burying, the rest go into the compost pile.

Her simple grave, complete with a baby tree of abundance succulent and other pretty succulent.

Its one of those things where it’s extra hard because there’s more I could have done at several points to make the outcome different. As a result I’m left without my silkie, only a spot in the ground left of her that only I would recognize. I’ve only got two silkies left and they’re both still somewhat sick and extremely small.

What I can do from now is to just be super diligent on checking my silkies for mites on a regular basis. Providing them with constant access to a dust bath will help too. And next time one gets sick, if it ever happens, I have a better idea of what to do to keep them from dying. It just really sucks that I had to lose Pepper, especially considering how much money we’ve lost in general pursuing the silkie dream.

If you want to help contribute to our silkie dream and help soften the blow of this and the loss of our four other silkies (and nearly our motorcycle) you can send us some Bitcoin Cash to this address, or contact us for other ways to donate.