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Free 2013 Bird Calendar

2013 Bird Calendar

To help educate backyard poultry owner’s about infectious poultry diseases and protect their birds, the United States Department of Agriculture is again offering a free calendar for 2013, called: Backyard Biosecurity: Keeping Your Birds Healthy.

The calendar features full-color photos of birds like the one shown below, and can be ordered at:  https://web01.aphis.usda.gov/PRTDIST/WebOrder/WOEIS.nsf   You can order up to two per individual address, and it always takes awhile for mine to get here – they say to allow six to eight weeks for delivery.

The USDA is getting the calendar out late this year, but it offers good advice on biosecurity that’s [...]

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Free 2012 Bird Calendar

2012 USDA  Bird Calendar

To help educate backyard poultry owner’s about infectious poultry diseases and protect their birds, the United States Department of Agriculture is again offering a free calendar for 2012, called: Backyard Biosecurity: Keeping Your Birds Healthy.  The calendar features full-color photos of birds like the one shown below, and can be ordered at: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/birdbiosecurity/s:  You can order up to two per individual address, and it always takes awhile for mine to get here so I recommend you send for it now – they say to allow six to eight weeks for delivery.

Vaccinating Chickens Against Infectious Bronchitis/Newcastle Disease

Banding

In addition to practicing Biosecurity to protect chickens from disease, vaccination is an effective way to prevent or reduce specific diseases in poultry.  Since we’ve had issues with Infectious Bronchitis (IB) in the past and it’s extremely contagious for poultry, we decided to vaccinate our chickens against it.  Although we plan to maintain a small-closed flock thereby minimizing possible exposure, IB can “jump” relatively large distances, so we decided to vaccinate anyway.  Anyone who takes birds to poultry shows, or buys from hatcheries or other sources and adds them to the flock; should definitely consider vaccinating for this and other common diseases.  [...]

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Infectious Bronchitis in Chickens

Wrinkled Egg - IB Symptom

Wrinkled Egg – IB Symptom

 

Back when I wrote about introducing new chickens into a flock (see Introducing New Chickens), I missed one important step, and we’re learning a painful lesson as a result.  It wasn’t enough to ask if the new chickens were vaccinated, we should have kept them separate from our flock for 30 days to make sure they couldn’t introduce disease.  

Infectious Bronchitis (IB)  

As it turns out, Bab and Will brought Infectious Bronchitis into our flock, and it’s destroyed the Golden Buffs ability to produce eggs (it does not affect humans).  Infectious bronchitis is a virus, it’s the [...]

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