Bath Day again!

It was a nice hot weekend again and it was round 2 for a chicken bath. Again I had added pyrethrum to the bath at a 1:1000 dilution just to kill off any live bugs, plus some bubble bath to help the liquid penetrate through the feathers.



Victim number 1

Look at those sad puppy eyes! She wasn't happy to be in the water and kept on trying to escape, but finally she relaxed and started to doze off. Not me though, I was extremely wet!

The aftermath....one very sad looking Pekin bantam...

Without all her fluffy feathers she's so small!

The good thing about Pekins getting wet is that you get to examine their skin without all those feathers in the way! And boy, we found quite a few lice eggs clinging to the feather shafts.

I found them impossible to pick off and had to snip them off with a pair of scissors. I use those small, stainless steel nail scissors that you get from the cosmetics section of shops. The smaller blade is much easier to use when you have a small thing to snip off. Most of the time I just snipped off the entire feather at the base. I figured that she has enough feathers anyway!

Oh, and I found out that the pyrethrum concentration that I used does not have ovicidal effects (kills off eggs). I checked DumDum 2 weeks after her bath and she had lice again >.<
Penguin though, still doesn't have any sign of lice

Victim number 2

Spot did look a bit whiter after her bath. She did make the bath water pretty brown though. Harder to spot lice eggs with the white feathers, but she had a few.

Victim 3

Chocolate in a blanket roll. She was probably the most fussy out of them all. The bath water went everywhere, and I got pretty wet too. She also had a few eggs snipped out.

Buffy's hens acted differently with the hair dryer to Penguin's hens. With Penguin's group, they all loved the hairdryer and dozed under the warm air. Buffy's group were determined to leave the house and it got quite tiring to try and hold a chicken and blow dry them at the same time.

The bath water was certainly dirtier than Penguin's group and I didn't see as many dead lice floating in the water (but then again, the water was quite dirty). I just hope that they feel better and not so itchy after their bath. I'll be investigating other methods of lice control as pyrethrum doesn't seem to have a lingering or ovicidal effect. Well, I didn't expect it to have a lingering effect since it degrades in the sun pretty quickly. I'm a bit hesitant to use a much higher concentration of pyrethrum in the bath, mainly because I would be using up pretty much the whole contents of the bottle. I'll probably try a spot on spray of a 1:100 concentration. That's still 40mg/L concentration, so quite safe for them.

Anyway, back to Buffy's group. What did they all do after their bath?
Have a bath in the dirt of course! With slightly damp feathers so they are all dirty again >.<
I can't win.

But now they are so fluffy and cuddly!
I did spend a lot of time cuddling my chickens that day!