Scaly leg mites, oh my!

Just as a watched pot never boils, it seemed to take forever for the milkweed pods to mature this year because we wanted to collect the seeds. And just like the pot boils over the minute you turn you back, milkweed fluff was flying all over last week after I’d given up watching for it.

Our finally-mature milkweed patch

I caught it early enough to not only collect seed, but also note that the pod does not release the seeds the moment it splits open (we call this dehiscence in the business). The fluff seems to get entangled so that only a few seeds fly away at a time.

Entangled milkweed seeds

The weather warmed again, giving me an opportunity to clean out the high tunnel without having my fingers go numb. So sad to see my lovely tomatoes, peppers, and beans headed for the compost.

Compost bins of beans, a pile of dead tomato and pepper plants in the back

The high tunnel only has herbs, beets, and a few carrots left, and I need to get the beets in pretty soon. It looks forlorn and empty, but I’m okay. I’m ready for a break.

The empty high tunnel. Terry will trim the peach tree when the leaves drop.

Only I didn’t get a break. I had Big Plans to get a lot of stuff done last weekend. Nearly the entire list was delayed when I noticed that Blackbeard wasn’t looking so good. She was missing a lot of neck feathers. I had seen this condition get worse since we moved the hens to their winter run, and I wrote it off to molting or pecking.

Blackbeard, looking motheaten and puny

But Friday, I saw that her feet were ugly. The scales were heaved up on the front instead of flat, and she had big bumps on the back.

Ugly feet. Normal feet are smooth and uniformly covered with scales.

I did my online research and decided it was scaly leg mites.  The mites are invisible, highly contagious, can cause severe anemia and even death, and, as far as I could discern, spend their whole life cycle on chicken feet. That last part was good news because they are a tiny bit easier to get rid of than the body mites that spend part of their time in the bedding and cracks in the coop. To make a long story short, the method that seemed easiest was to soak the hens’ feet in rubbing alcohol for two minutes. I did them all, even though only the older hens seemed affected. The girls weren’t too keen on it, so a good deal of the treatment area (and I) got an alcohol shower.  I also changed the bedding and sprayed the coop and perch with Permethrin, just in case. It took most of Sunday to get that all sorted out. And I get to do it all again this Sunday and the Sunday after that because eggs will continue to hatch over three weeks. Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!

I can’t even report if it worked or not for a month or more because I have to wait for new scales to grow in. I think Blackbeard is looking perkier, and for whatever reason, the egg production seems to have increased.

As long as I was taking pictures, I took one of Goldie, a first-year hen. She is one of the most beautiful Ameraucana we have ever had. She has a prodigious beard, both under her beak and on her cheeks.

Goldie, hale and hearty.

So four days late, I can check “blog post” off Sunday’s list!