Red Mite, this is war!

A few weeks ago, whilst cleaning out the chickens, I spotted what every chicken keeper dreads, the infamous red mite. I thought I had them a few months before, but a quick look on the net confirmed I had in fact just spotted a red spider mite. Similar looking, but not harmful to the chooks.

Red Spider mite:

Red mite:

 

After as bit of searching around the coop, it became apparent that the infestation was far worse than I first thought. I couldn’t understand how it had got that bad. I have a chicken routine. I try to do a quick clear out of the chickens every day, I change their bedding and wood shavings once a week and about once a month, everything has a scrub down. I hadn’t noticed any of the signs before, the chickens were their normal selves, but they were there and it was time to act swiftly!

First I panicked! I’d read that red mite was a real pain to get rid of, if not impossible. There were stories of people having to burn their coops! That was something I didn’t really want to do if I could help it. So after I calmed down I thought it was best to do some research.

It soon became apparent that in order to win this war, I needed to understand my enemy. Red mite live in the nooks and crannies of the chicken coop. They are not like fleas and don’t live on the chicken itself. They come out at night and then feed on the birds blood for an hour or so before going off to hide again. I have a wooden coop with many nooks and crannies so that was going to be an issue.

 

Red mites can cause low health in your chickens, their egg laying can drop and in extreme cases the chicken becomes anaemic and as a result, croaks it. The mites have a 7 day life cycle, it takes 2/3 days to hatch out their eggs and then by the 7th day, they become a mature adult. This was the first information that was really handy, if I could get them before they became an adult and before they laid any eggs, then I would stop that mite in its tracks.

I also browsed the net for the weapons I'd need to win. The two that seemed to stand out were Diatom Powder, this is crushed up fossilised algae that apparently dries out the mites shell and in turn, kills them. The second was Poultry Shield, this is a liquid that you dilute with water and then wash the coop down with. It breaks down organic matter, eradicates the environment that mites love and live in, dehydrates them, then they die. Both seemed to have the desired effect.  So after a bit of online shopping and a day waiting for them to arrive, I was armed and ready for the war to begin.

My plan was simple. I would take the coop apart as much as possible. I would then jet wash the coop, paying particular attention to the places I thought the mites might be hiding. Then I would scrub everything down with Poultry Shield, let that dry, then dust the whole thing with Diatom Powder. If I repeated this every 6 days, thinking about the life cycle of the mite, I might just win.

So that is what I did, four times in the end.  It was such an awful job. Every time I tried to let the coop dry, it would rain. I lost a few screws, forgot where parts went and on a couple of occasions, accidently jet washed a chicken. Don’t worry, all chickens are fine. However, a month on, there doesn’t seem to be a red mite in sight (I can't see much though due to the volume of diatom powder in there, I did get a bit carried away). I have now made this a monthly operation, I certainly don’t look forward to it, but if I can keep those little buggers at bay, it’ll be worth it.

 Andrew.