I have had chickens, and guinea fowl for just over a year. I have learned a LOT and there is a lot I am still learning.

It's been a bit difficult to gather birds from several different places-- each place with different circumstances, each chicken with different immune systems, and develop them into a sustainable flock in an area where there have been no chickens for well over 20 years, and tons of wildlife carrying all sorts of fun stuff abounds!

Overall it's been very fun, believe it or not... but we've had a few oopses and had a few illnesses to address. Overall I'd say we've done very well!

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Here at Applesnitch Farms we are incorporating our birds into our Permaculture Project as helpers. I know there are tons of different ways of doing things and many people do not agree, but we are attempting to keep them entirely Organically raised. (Aloe Juice kills coccidiosis absolutely for sure..! But that is for another post! :) We want our flock to be as fully integrated with the natural environment we live in as possible, so that they are a sustainable flock that could theoretically survive in the wild if there were a need for it due to any number of scenarios.

This winter has been a bit rough in that as soon as the weather got cold, something brought mites into the coops in the barn. Then they got fowl pox, yay. Then we found out that not all birds said to be cold hardy are actually cold hardy! Great. Lol.

Everything was super cleaned as much as could be for an old barn-- including using various oils and vinegar to kill anything that could be crawling. (I did use bleach on the concrete floors well ahead of having moved the chickens in there for the winter so as not to have any issues with ammonia.)

I suspect a mouse, or a wild bird, but that is neither here nor there. There's too much wildlife to avoid every possible thing that coud happen. That's fine, but how to deal with the mites? It's the little black ones that crawl all over them. Eww. Anyhoo, I will spare you photos of the back end of chickens (no I didn't take any!) but I did manage to kill most of the mites off by personally giving each chicken and guinea (yeah that was fun...haha!) a scrub down with DE in sub zero temps. I should have done this again a week later and didn't. I used the kind from Tractor Supply that is labeled as food Grade but is not really human food grade that time because it was all I could find. They seemed to all be gone.

I've just had to do it again because the mites have made a comeback. I fed them garlic, a lot of it, for a few days first, hoping it would at least begin to weaken the mites (not sure that did anything at all!) Then I spent (as pictured) some time giving them each a dust bath with the white food grade DE from the health food store. (54 of the birds which are in that buiding ) This is much finer, and is supposedly supposed to be better to use, but I don't think it has done as much as the grayish kind from TSC. I think the crystal syllica in the TSC kind is more abrasive and that it did more to get rid of mites and eggs. I've had a look at a handful of them since and I'm not seeing any crawlers at the moment, but I'm sure I'm going to have to do more. Hopefully the DE has managed to kill most of the mites and damaged the mites eggs!

If anyone has any suggestions aside from the more toxic ones I'd love to hear them! I know I'll have to clean out everything but I am hoping to keep the problem down for a few weeks until it is warmer and do it then because we did deep bedding and it's a large area I need to keep some insulation on for a little while yet with the unpredicatble weather patterns we have been seeing. Looking for ideas!?! I was considering using sulfur powder, or bathing them in something like essential oils in some sort of shampoo. I don't want to wet them in this weather and have to blow dry almost 60 birds!!! They have wood ash, and dirt dust bathing areas but it's just not enough to get rid of these creepy crawlies! (For anyone who doesn't know, no they don't get on people and stay on them! :)