Does Our Flock Have the Flu?

July 10, 2015

The turkey poult—you call young turkeys poults, not chicks—lays on her back, kicking her legs. She reminded me more of an upended turtle than anything with feathers on it. I was puzzled—surely she was doing this intentionally? How could she not right herself?

I scooped her up, put her on her feet. She waddled off, seemingly fine.

Had I just imagined that? I climbed the stairs from the basement, where we raise birds until they're big enough for a barn stall. I mentioned it to my wife, Heather—she’s our resident husbandry expert. She had no idea what it meant either.

A day later, we were in crisis mode. The little poult had died suddenly, as had several of her siblings, all showing the same puzzling set of symptoms: found struggling on their backs, look okay after they were righted, but then dead within hours. By the time the die-off had run its course, we'd lost 11 of the 24 birds Heather had ordered.

We faced a terrible question: Were our poults succumbing to avian flu?

It was hard to say. On the one hand, the H5N1 or N2 influenza viruses haven’t shown up yet in Pennsylvania birds. And Heather had changed our supplier to one in a flu-free region to lower the risk of them coming to us already infected.

But on the other hand, the pandemic has now hit the Midwest fairly hard, with millions of birds culled—that is, killed whether healthy or not, to prevent the spread of disease. Pennsylvania is one of a number of big poultry states bracing for its first case.

We knew the drill: If you suspect the flu, call the Department of Health. They send techs out to test your flock. If they’re positive—again, this hasn't happened in the state yet—then they euthanize them.

It's hard to convey the panic I got from that thought. If you raise livestock you understand: Your stock aren't pets, they aren't family members. Not quite. But they are a part of your life, and when you start raising them you take on a responsibility. For us, that means we give them as natural and healthy a life as we can, allowing them to be birds, or sheep, or pigs, without any unnecessary physical constraints. Once they're old enough to care for themselves, our birds are given a field to roam, hunt and peck and form their own little societies. Some are destined to be eaten—but first we want them to live well. We never, ever waste an animal's life if we can at all help it.

Killing a flock of birds because they may have flu seems as wasteful as you can get. Should a flock in Pennsylvania test positive, I admit that culling is our only option. But I don't have to like it.

We were lucky. An internet search brought the answer to Heather: our poults were dying of, believe it or not, "turkey flip over syndrome"—a mysterious illness that sometimes kills poults. Its causes are unknown, but it's probably metabolic and not contagious.

Give the supplier credit: When Heather called to tell them, they sent us more replacement birds than we'd lost, and they’ve been healthy. No flu, no culling, our flocks are fine.

Ours is a hobby farm—by my definition, it will never earn enough money to pay its mortgage. We'd do okay without our chickens, turkeys and Guinea fowl, though my heart goes out to folks with affected flocks who do depend on them for their livelihoods. But the place would seem empty without the poultry. More importantly, it would feel like our failure. Like we hadn't held up our end of the awesome, mysterious, and yes, sometimes troubling, relationship with our livestock.