These 5 are getting lots of feedings and growing like crazy.
I have started to wonder if the chicks might have some kind of external parasites. They have pink patches and have appeared to be restless and chewing on themselves. Before I thought that the wet patches must be from the rain but the weather has been good for the last couple of days. I am just wondering what, if anything, could or would be done in a situation where chicks acquire something like fleas or lice?
The pink patches are skin and its because they are growing so fast. They double in size in the first week and their hatch feathers can't cover there rapidly growing bodies. They double again in the next 10 days but their second batch of fuzzy whites starts to fill in at this stage so that by the time we band them (21-15 days) they are all white and fuzzy (a full crop will always bulge through and doesn't have feathers so don't panic
).
As for the "chewing", they get to a point where the hardwiring to groom/preen kicks in, even though they haven't really got the feathers for it, they start to spend lots of time grooming themselves. Considering how important it is for them in their lives, its pretty neat to watch them first trying it out as chicks. And it doesn't indicate that there are fleas/lice/parasites in the nest. There certainly can be, but its not a given. We generally don't have anything in our nests - on the birds that have been injured or that have died as chicks, when they are examined, parasites are always looked for and we rarely get any findings. Having said that when you have the remains of prey (some adults are tidier than others) and 3-4 smelly, pooping chicks living in a confined area for 2 months, its always a possibility. So no, the preening isn't in response to anything other than hardwiring in all the chicks - for some there might be pests as well.
