Poultry Keepers Podcast

Poultry Health Master Class-Part 1

• Carey Blackmon and Jeff Mattocks • Season 3 • Episode 136

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Welcome to The Poultry Keepers Podcast! In this first installment of our four-part Poultry Health Master Class series, Carey Blackmon and Jeff Mattocks dive deep into the most common poultry health issues—and how to manage them naturally and effectively.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to identify and treat:

  • Dry vs. Wet Fowl Pox — what they look like and how they spread
  • Infectious Bursal Disease (IBD) and what signs to watch for
  • CRD (Mycoplasma) and other respiratory illnesses: prevention and biosecurity
  • Fowl Cholera and other look-alike respiratory conditions
  • The right use of natural remedies like garlic tincture, oregano, and CEG (Cayenne + Echinacea + Garlic)
  • Smart management tips for small-flock health, mosquito control, and maintaining strong immune systems

This is the must-hear foundation for anyone who wants to raise healthier birds without relying heavily on antibiotics. Tune in as Carey and Jeff share real-world insights, field-tested remedies, and practical prevention strategies every small-flock keeper can use.

Don’t miss Part 2 next Tuesday as the Poultry Health Master Class continues!
 
 

Visit www.thepoultrykeeperspodcast.com to listen now and for more episodes, guides, and free resources.

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Alex:

Welcome to another episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. In this episode Carey Blackmon and Jeff Mattocks begin a four part series on poultry health issues you may encounter with your flock, and what to do about them. So without any further adieu here's Carey and Jeff.

Carey Blackmon:

Birds are starting to get issues and people are wondering what it is. So I figured, hey, to help these people. Let's do a show. So

Jeff Mattocks:

let's put it on paper, right? Yeah,

Carey Blackmon:

let's do it. All right. So to speak, we're gonna talk about fpos, Merricks, other parasites. And you get me and Jeff together, we're gonna talk about natural remedies and'cause we don't even take antibiotics ourself unless we're about to die. Yeah. And then it could be debatable. Like Rip says, you are what you eat, eats. And yeah, if you eat your eggs or your chickens, you don't wanna put in there. So yeah. Let's get to it. And even she agrees. It is as good as chat, GPT, especially when you ask chat GPT chicken questions.'cause whether or not it's correct is debatable. All right, Jeff.

Music:

Yes,

Carey Blackmon:

sir. Everybody knows what dry fowl PX is here. Recently we started seeing a bunch of stuff online, of course, about wet. So can you tell us the difference between wet foul PX and dry fowl px?

Jeff Mattocks:

Dry fpo looks like a black freckle or a black dot on a comb, or a waddle or a skin area where a mosquito has, drawn blood, bitten. Drawn blood from your bird and it is spreading that virus. It's spread the same way as wet. Wet PX is spread the same way. However, it's a more vi, vient, Vient is a word I shouldn't use. It's not made for me. But anyway it's a more difficult version of f px where you will see discharge out of the eye, discharge out of the nasal. You'll hear respiratory, respiratory sounds that you shouldn't be hearing. To me, wet px, wet foul PX is much harder to manage because of all the discharge.

Music:

Okay. Yeah.

Jeff Mattocks:

Dry px, the bird will act a little lethargic. It'll, it'll act, ill a little bit generally don't kill birds with dry p with the dry version of the fowl box, but, it doesn't look good, especially if you're going to show. Yeah, but Wet PX is really messy, right?

Carey Blackmon:

Alright. One of the things that I saw that described Wet px, made it sound and almost look like the bird had lesions around its mouth because of the. The mucus and stuff coming out of, its like eyes and ears,

Jeff Mattocks:

really severe cases. I, I've only seen a handful of those over the years. Usually it's just eye discharge, nasal discharge. You can get some out of the beak, oral discharge, depending on how far it goes when you get to the oral discharge coming out of the beak. That's when, I'll see like those lesions slash scarring. But a bird with a strong immune system, it usually doesn't get to that point, but it can. And I see a higher mortality with the wet px.

Carey Blackmon:

I was gonna say the wet foul ps a lot of the stuff that I saw also referenced the higher mortality.'cause to me the easiest way to explain the dry is it is like a very light case of a kid getting chickenpox, which I don't know which one gets its name from the other. Yeah, I don't know that dang mosquitoes. Which I came up with a really good natural remedy that so far, knock on woods. None of my birds have been affected by this year, even though I'm in like an area where mosquitoes are the size of house flies, my natural remedy is bats.

Jeff Mattocks:

Oh, you got the bat house up.

Carey Blackmon:

So several months ago we talked about it and I don't know if you didn't Rip, thought I was joking or not, but I actually bought a 16 foot post and it was a six by six, which is an overkill for two bat houses, but you can't get a four by four anywhere locally that tall. And I used my new handy dandy. We'd either your power to auger and buried that thing in the ground as far as I could, stuck the post in there, which pretty heavy by an a. If you get the corner in and hook the top to your truck, you can make it work hurt. But once I got it in there, I got on a stepladder and. I was able to screw those in and there's some kind of pheromone spray or something I sprayed on them and I didn't think nothing about it. I got it sitting over out of the way'cause they don't like to be near lights and all that kind of stuff. So put it down in the wood line. Everything just went till one night. I was out there tucking my birds in and some other birds. Made me say some four letter words flying through the air, and then I realized that I invited them and we don't have a lot of mosquitoes anymore that I don't know if they really can eat like 20,000 of them a night. But I can say my population around my house of mosquitoes has greatly disappeared. So is there anything else that you can do for Fal px?

Jeff Mattocks:

You just keep the immune system as high as you can.

Carey Blackmon:

Would you like if your birds got it? Essentially the only thing you can do is feed'em really good. Maybe give'em some garlic tincture in their water and. Treat the symptoms while they're,

Jeff Mattocks:

believe it or not, the garlic getting

Carey Blackmon:

over it.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. The garlic tincture or the CEG worked really well for it, right? Just depends on how far you let it get before you, you started treating it. Yeah. It will spread in shared water, bowls, water, watering devices, things like that. So you can spread it, orally or, from the mucus. So you should isolate those birds. I said dry fpos really is not I don't see a lot of birds dying from it. Yeah, they just act really sick for about three days and then they seem to come out of it, but those black dots on their combs and wattles don't always go away. So you can almost tell if a bird's had foul Ps in the past now,

Carey Blackmon:

because they'll have on their comb, especially if they've got the specs like in the comb. On the sides or whatever that means that they've either been fighting or it could be a scar from foul pops. Is that what you're saying?

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah.

Carey Blackmon:

Or a good chance of

Jeff Mattocks:

it. That little black spot where the mosquito bit'em can be there for years. There's some flocks that I get the opportunity to visit, on a semi-regular basis. And you can see the, you can see that black dot from the foul box, it's still there from previous years. So it, it's very slow. And I don't know if those skin cells on the comb and water regenerate slower than others do. And maybe that's why. Yeah. Or, does that does that discoloration, that black dot from the mosquito bite, does it go deeper into the tissue and take that much longer to grow out, so to speak? Yeah.

Carey Blackmon:

I know there's been some mosquitoes get pretty deep in my tissue, especially on my arms and my legs. I had one right here on my eyebrow one time, and that was painful. Laura said that the CEG for a couple of friends flocks, it had respiratory issues. It worked really well.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, it does.

Carey Blackmon:

Yeah.

Jeff Mattocks:

The, it really does. It's not cheap, but it's worth keeping on hand.'Cause by the time you have an illness, you order it from a Dr. Paul's lab, place. And you get it shipped in. You're talking a week, right? And you don't have a week to wait. If you're treating an infection or an illness or something like that, then you just don't, if you let it go for a week before you treat it, that's not good.

Carey Blackmon:

Yeah, people ask about you see all the time, what do you have in your chicken medicine cabinet? I got some garlic tincture. I got some stuff that I made with oregano. I, and I got a hatchet.

Jeff Mattocks:

See, I'll give a, okay. For something like fo plug. Yeah, I don't know how much of a natural immunity a flock is gonna build up to that, right? Because, you could go 10 years and never have fpo, and then you get a warm summer breeze blowing in from the south off the swamp, and all of a sudden you got it right. So it's not, see, I

Carey Blackmon:

never, I never had it till two years ago. And perfect example. Two years ago the mosquitoes were the worst because we had a really mild winter. Usually if it's below freezing for a week, at least in a row, we have a lot less population of them. But that didn't really happen that time.

Jeff Mattocks:

So yeah, you should be okay. So we're coming into migratory season. We've already started migratory season of the waterfowl. So for the most part, the waterfowl or migratory birds are carriers and they have immunity to it. Because they've had repeated exposure. The mosquito, bites a duck, injects a duck or draws blood from a duck. Next thing it. Blows in and injects your chicken and well, there you go. That's how it, that's how it moves around. Yeah. It's not like every, not every mosquito has is a carrier a foul px, so if not,

Carey Blackmon:

you should be good. Ted says, what is CEG? CEG is a product made by Dr. Paul's lab. It's a cayenne echinacea. And garlic tincture together.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, they're all tinctured together. I don't know the formula, so I don't know the ratio of the garlic, the cayenne to echinacea. But yeah.

Carey Blackmon:

I know the taste,

Jeff Mattocks:

it's not good, but because

Carey Blackmon:

I, I will say this stuff works good for people too. Works really good. I was having a respiratory issue. And I took a spoon of it straight out of the jar, a lot more than what I expected. I didn't realize I had a respiratory system for a few hours, so it's definitely really hard on the Cayenne. But the next day when I woke up, hey, I had no issues. It was well worth it. So that's what it is. It's a great product. It's not cheap. It's not no matter where you look for it.

Jeff Mattocks:

But it's got an insanely long life shelf life on it.'Cause it's in the grain alcohol. And so as long as you store it half decently then it's gonna be. Sue says she made it.

Carey Blackmon:

Yeah, you can make it. I have some in my closet and I would recommend you make it in an area that does not have a lot of airflow while you're doing it, which is one of the reasons why I actually have a respirator. But you can, the echinacea is not cheap, but a little good. EC is not

Jeff Mattocks:

cheap. You can find cheap echinacea,

Carey Blackmon:

but you fine keep everything

Jeff Mattocks:

but right. But it's not, you take your chances on whether it was harvested correctly. Yeah. And at the right stage of growth for potency, yeah. Once it goes past bloom, it's not echinacea is not, it's not as powerful.

Carey Blackmon:

So I, I had a good friend of mine who's actually watching, put me on a distributor that sold good echinacea by the pound and, it was not quite as steep as the taste of it, but they're proud of it. But again,

Jeff Mattocks:

it works. Wait about$12 a pound?

Carey Blackmon:

Ooh, that would be nice.

Jeff Mattocks:

Oh,

Carey Blackmon:

it was double that if I remember.

Music:

Okay.

Carey Blackmon:

All right. So what is infectious Bursal disease? IBD.

Jeff Mattocks:

Infectious bursal disease.

Music:

Yeah.

Jeff Mattocks:

I have not delved into this one a whole lot. Now one person said, it's also called gumbo. Gumbo. So when you, okay, so like in the Philippines or over in Asia? On that side of the world, or even down in the Caribbean islands. They've nicknamed it gumbo. Okay. I've only ran into it two or three times in, in, in my lifetime. So I haven't cut any open. I can't really tell you what it looks like. It will take a lot of birds and it'll take'em at different ages if they don't have any immunity to it. Oftentimes so they're posturing. So I'm a really big person as far as diagnosing based on what position a bird dies in, right? So for everybody who's listening, if you want my help, the best thing you can do is take a picture of the bird in the position that you found it. Dead end. Especially if this is happening to more than one. This starts to become a repeat thing,

Carey Blackmon:

and I promise you won't be the only person that does that, because I've been with Jeff and people have sent him some random rather awkward pictures of chickens.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah,

Carey Blackmon:

so do it.

Jeff Mattocks:

People wanna move'em so the picture looks better. Don't do that. You move to get the picture right. Don't move, never move the dead bird to send me the picture. But everything's different, right? So if they're, but they, the infectious bursal disease, I always find them straight out, right leg, straight back, face down. Head stretched out and, but it's not the only disease. I find a bird in that position. But that's, that's one of the clues, right? So the position a bird dies in is a big clue as to what might be the illness.

Carey Blackmon:

Okay.

Jeff Mattocks:

Take the picture before you move it. Okay. And you're never gonna describe it to me well enough. Just take the picture right In this day and age, picture's

Carey Blackmon:

worth a thousand yards, right? A thousand words

Jeff Mattocks:

this day and age. Almost everybody has a smartphone. Zoom in on it, take a really good picture, take a couple, send them, right? Take pictures, take pictures of the bird, of the sick bird before it dies, right? And send that. So for whatever reason, they posture differently based on what part of their body is being affected. Okay. But I have not because of how because of how strong or, scary infectious bursal is. I have not actually opened any up in the field. Yeah,

Carey Blackmon:

You could run the risk of spreading it, right? Yeah. And

Jeff Mattocks:

That one's pretty, pretty harsh.

Carey Blackmon:

I've heard of Bural in cattle. Is it by any chance the same? I don't

Jeff Mattocks:

know.

Carey Blackmon:

Or maybe a different strain.

Jeff Mattocks:

You, you got me?

Carey Blackmon:

I know what I'm doing tomorrow. I'm finding out. What kinda management practices could you do to prevent CRD or commonly called mycoplasma? Or pretty much any other respiratory disease. What is it, what is something you could do as a management practice to prevent that?

Jeff Mattocks:

Most of the time your CRD is gonna come in either with rodents or with wild birds, right? You can track it in on your boots and shoes depending on where you were at. Hopefully everyone, you know this show's been going on long enough and that the majority of the people who come and listen and watch, you have a set of boots that only goes to your chicken houses and never leaves the farm. Okay? Like you got chore boots. And your chore boots should never go to somebody else's farm to do chores. It really should not leave your acreage, okay? It should, so that's, people don't actually realize how many things they track on their own. They walk it in, right? So the shoes and the boots that you wear off your farm or off your place. You park those at one door and you put on your other boots for taking care of your animals. Smartest thing you're ever gonna do. You probably should have a different set of clothes. Cheap pair of coveralls, something like that, that, stays, it's what you do your chores in. You need to be really careful with visitors. Everybody loves to show off their chickens. Or their animals. I get it.

Carey Blackmon:

That's what pictures are for.

Jeff Mattocks:

But you you just have to have some protocols there. It's not that big a deal to get, a little flat tray, pour a little bit of bleach in it or something like that, that somebody steps in on their way in. Okay. Just little things like that. Cheap little things like that.

Carey Blackmon:

Rob says, at the very least, he don't want his shoes with chicken poop to go anywhere with him, let alone the fear of bringing something back. Yeah, and I get it.'cause if you walk into my red barn, which is the one that's right at the end of my driveway, you'll see my boots and there's two other pair of boots in there. It's my hands. I bought both of'em a pair of boots before they started helping and they stay in the barn. And I told'em, I was like, Hey, look, you're the only person that's gonna wear'em. Nobody else is sticking their sweaty foot in it, but this is your pair. I don't want you to come from somewhere else. I don't know if a chicken person with some kind of disease walked through Walmart, then you walk through Walmart and bring it back to the house. I don't do it. Those, the boots, once they go in that barn, they don't leave the property.

Jeff Mattocks:

Rob was making a comment about the powdered bleach Rob actually, it's just the powdered chlorine that you would get at a pool supply. You can get it in the large buckets. So it's, you can get dried, granulated, bleach and it's a, you can get it at Walmart, and the little pales, it's just, powdered chlorine. Yep. You should be able to get it. It just doesn't say bleach on it. It uses the term chlorine on it.

Carey Blackmon:

Yeah. It'll say either chlorine or sodium hypochlorite. Yep.

Jeff Mattocks:

Let's see now. Now you're getting technical.

Carey Blackmon:

I make it okay. I know a thing or two about chemicals. Is it a good idea to add garlic and apple cider vinegar periodically to water or only when needed?

Jeff Mattocks:

Here's the thing, and everybody needs to hear this right. While I love using oregano, thyme, basil, garlic, cayenne, all these different herbs, when we start using them every day or on a routine basis, you now take the opportunity to wait to every, use them as a treatment. Okay? So you need to decide, do you want to use these as that treatment when something does go wrong? Now vinegar you can use all the time, right? I that I have no issues with that. You follow your own personal beliefs and convictions on whether vinegar's good, bad, or indifferent. I always used vinegar in the chicken water, when we had our chickens here. But all of these healing herbs, you gotta be careful using them all the time. Eventually you can the bacterias and the viruses can eventually build up a resistance to them. And, but I can't, I don't get the same re effect out of using them as a treatment when somebody uses them as a nutritional supplement. So just, you really gotta be careful there. You gotta make up your own mind and either you're gonna feed it all the time and use it or you're not.

Carey Blackmon:

Yep. What are common signs of foul cholera and how might you manage an outbreak

Jeff Mattocks:

foul cholera. Okay, so when you start getting into a lot of these different respiratory diseases, like a Fal, cholera, CRD, et cetera.

Carey Blackmon:

Aren't a lot of'em the same

Jeff Mattocks:

Exactly. At the farm level, trying to diagnose'em you, you can be chasing, most of these are coming from the Mycoplasm family anyway. Which are really difficult to manage. So yeah, just. You're gonna see the, you're gonna see those that you can see. The only one that gives you a telltale is Newcastle, because you get the wrinkled digs, right? Yeah. You start seeing wrinkled digs. The rest of'em, you just see that you, you hear that rattling. You're gonna hear some sneezing, some siding. But you don't know which respiratory you have. Could be rizza, could be CRD, could be Fal cholera, right? FAL cholera has a higher mortality usually than Rizza or CRD, but without getting it cultured at like a university vet lab kind of thing. It's really hard to pinpoint and know exactly what you have, and that's why, on some of the different Facebook groups that I do, that I am still on as far as poultry goes, people trying to identify whether it's CRD, flc or even true za in these different, at a farm level. It's almost impossible to tell exactly which one you have, right? Because the symptoms are so close together.

Alex:

Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Poultry Keepers Podcast. This concludes part one of Poultry Health. Be sure to join us next Tuesday when we bring you part two of this four part series. Until then keep learning, keep improving and keep enjoying the birds you love!

People on this episode

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John Gunterman

Co-host
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Mandelyn Royal

Co-host
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Rip Stalvey

Co-host