Essential Tips for Flock Health

One of the most often overlooked aspects of keeping chickens is dealing with external parasites. Nobody likes thinking about bugs crawling all over their chickens’ skin. All too often, external parasites invade a flock and then quickly spread. One of the common external parasites is the northern fowl mite, which affects small flocks as much as commercial operations.

Mites are small, wingless and in the same family as spiders because they have eight legs. They are blood-sucking insects found on chickens during the day and at night. They are red to black and are visible without magnification.

Do My Birds Have Them?

A heavy infestation of these mites can make the feathers significantly below the vent look dirty. The mites cause scabs around the vent’s skin and can also affect the skin below the vent.

An accumulation of dried blood and mite feces darkens the feathers. Your birds will also begin grooming excessively. This is because the insects crawling on their skin make them uncomfortable.

You may see them fiddling with the feathers below their vent or in other locations on their bodies that have accumulated the parasites.

Lastly, you will see a decrease in feather quality. Feathers will lose their luster and look tattered, with small chunks missing from the ends. Additionally, you will begin to see the luster of the feathers fade due to all the activity the bird is doing with preening.

How to Identify Northern Fowl Mites

Your first clue that you have northern fowl mites is that they are found on the birds during the day versus the poultry red mite, which tends to crawl at night. You will want to pick up your chickens and look carefully at the feathers around the vent. Since the feathers below the vent tend to be thicker, you will likely find external parasites in this location first.

The mites also lay eggs in the feathers around the vent and under the wings. Extreme infestations may cause the feathers to “glue” together, making it difficult for the owners to spread the feathers apart so they can see down to the skin. Look carefully at the base of the feathers and the skin.

Mites will freeze when exposed to sunlight, so you should continue looking at the feathers for up to a minute. Initially, mites may appear as dirt or dust bath material caught in the feathers. The big difference is that, eventually, the mites will begin moving again. Mites do not move quickly, unlike lice, so you will need to dedicate enough time to check all of the birds in your flock.

Depending on the breeds and varieties you raise, your ability to see mites can be even more difficult. You can set a white sheet of paper on top of a table and ruffle the feathers of your chicken over the paper, focusing on feathers below the vent and under the wings. Do not forget to get down to the skin to dislodge any potential mites. The paper will catch any dirt, mites or mite droppings on your birds. Mites will eventually start moving on the paper.

Mite droppings consist of the remnants of the blood meal they take from the bird’s skin and turn red when wet on the paper. If you live close enough to a land-grant university with an extension entomologist, you can take several of the mites to them for expert analysis.

Lastly, you may have a hint that you have mites in your flock if you see them on the eggs you collect daily. Sometimes, mites take up residence in a nest box. They crawl on the egg surface making them easy to spot. Additionally, you may see red smudge marks on the egg if the mites on the surface are smashed as the egg moves around in the nest box or collection basket.

Elimination Strategies

If your flock has northern fowl mites, you must treat the whole flock and do a full cleanout of the coop. Make your battle against external parasites quick and decisive so that your chickens can experience relief quickly. The fastest and most effective method is to use a spray or dust. You spray the skin of the bird rather than applying the material to the feathers.

Several effective products are available that you can apply to the bird and the chicken coop environment. Permectrin II 10% and Premo Poultry Spray are easy to apply and can be found online or in local feed stores. Permectrin II 10% has an active ingredient of permethrin which is derived from chrysanthemum flowers.

Premo Poultry Spray has active ingredients of clove oil and cottonseed oil as its active ingredients and a pleasant scent in the coop. Other products are available, so be sure to inspect product labels before selecting and using products labeled for poultry use.

Additionally, to treat the chicken coop environment, you can use Premo Mite Killer Spray, which is very effective against insect invaders in the coop environment, but it cannot be sprayed on the chickens. It has active ingredients that include sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium chloride and citric acid. Essentially these ingredients kill by penetrating the chitinous outer layer of the insects.

If you are not interested in using any type of spray to remove these mites from the skin of your birds, then you will need to bathe your chickens in warm, soapy water. You must pay particular attention to areas around the crest and beard or muffs of breeds with these breed-specific features.

You should then rinse your chickens and let them dry completely. Use gentle soap flakes or ivory soap without dyes when bathing your birds. You will need to clean out and scrub the interior with warm, soapy water, allowing it to dry overnight. Then, reassemble your coop with fresh bedding and clean equipment.

Mite-y Prevention

To keep this creepy crawly critter from making your flock unwell, you should keep your flock well away from wild birds. Wild birds can bring this organism to your clean, healthy and happy flock. That also means locating coops away from trees where wild birds can land and drop mites off their bodies (they don’t want the mites either).

Also, if you bring in new birds and mix them with your flock, you can invite this parasite into your coop. You may examine new birds and not see mites, but you will not necessarily see mite eggs. That is why you should keep new birds in quarantine for several weeks.

Lastly, one interesting route that can bring in the mites is sharing equipment with other chicken keepers. Be sure to practice good biosecurity and do not share equipment at all. If equipment must be shared, then it will need to be washed and disinfected.

Your flock looks to you for their overall health, so do them a favor and give them an occasional once-over. You may get the heebie-jeebies about external parasites, but your flock will thank you in the long run. Keep in mind that your poultry depends on you to provide them with the level of care necessary to keep them happy and healthy.