A gentle rooster

No it’s not an oxymoron. There are gentle roosters. Roosters that don’t attack you every time you enter thier space. We have two True Greens that are great. But unfortunately the free Lavender Orpington rooster we adopted got really aggressive once we put him with his hens. Someone suggested that it was because he was the only rooster in that coop but I’m not convinced. He is so aggressive that every single time we go in to fill the water or the food he tries to attack us. We have to use a stick to keep him back.

Since we got the Lavender Orpingtons to raise and sell as multi purpose birds, we do need a rooster.

So we started looking for another rooster.

Through Craigslist we found a place called Forked Farms in Rogers that has English Orpingtons and they had a Lavender Orpington rooster we could buy.

We met the owner at her gate a handled the rooster a bit and he seemed fine.

-What we should have done though was inspect the roots of the feathers. But we didn’t.-

We noticed that evening that he had mites crawling on him and put some diatomaceous earth in a big bowl for him to bathe in. (Chickens like to take a dust bath in ashes which helps keep mites away)

Unfortunately a few days later we found him falling over and almost dead. Good thing we had him isolated. It’s always a good idea to keep new animals isolated at least 2 weeks before introducing them to your other animals.

We inspected him carefully and and found mites, fleas and some other bug crawling all over him. The mite eggs on his feather stems were so encrusted that some of them were two inches across!

So we mixed up some permetherin and sprayed him down really well.

We hand fed him meal worms and molasses water with a dropper as well as b12, every few hours.

After two days he was looking a little better but he had this gross mucus in his beak. So we started him on penicillin g injections to treat the infection.

He is still a bit light on his feet but he is standing and pecking and eating and drinking on his own. I’m not thrilled with the price I paid for such a sick rooster. But if he makes it, hopefully it will all be worth it! Would I recommend Forked Farms…I would say yes (she did communicate with me some) but inspect your birds very carefully *first*, all the way down to the roots of the feathers. I would NOT recommend using diatomaceous earth to treat an infestation. It didn’t work for us, that’s for sure.