Skinny chicken

[notasausage]

I have a black rock who is about 25 wks old and has been laying well since we got her at the end of April. However I noticed last week that she is significantly thinner than my others who are a mix of breeds, having previously been a good weight. She's also been behaving a little oddly, spending a lot of time dust bathing to the exclusion of everything else including corn! They all free range and she seems to be eating and foraging as normal. I gave the house a good scub out yesterday and gave the house and all the chickens a good dusting of louse powder. Am going to worm them all this week. Have I missed anything else and are there any good supplements out there than I can try. They are on layers pellets, approx 1/2 mug of corn between them and apple cider vinegar in their water.

How is her comb, is it still upright or is it flopped over or very dry looking?

Usually if there is something wrong they will stop laying and then when they are more seriously ill the comb will go.

If you pick her up how does her crop feel?

Crop seems to be empty in the morning. She doesn't have much of a comb but it doesn't look floppy and DH is convinced that she's laying (we have another chicken that could be laying the brown eggs but DH saw the Black Rock in the nest box then collected a nice warm egg!) I wondered if she was coming into moult but I have read that they don't moult until the end of their second summer.

Hmm. Mine moulted at a year old.

Amongst the other reasons any of mine lost weight were, going broody (comb pales, eggs stop, eating lessens and get stay in the nesting box), eating too much dried grass- causing the crop to impact (this caused starvation and she had to be dispatched ), and catching a cold!

Could she have worms I wonder, or be being kept from the food by the others? Maybe try some Verm-x de-wormer, and offer her some porridge daily to fatten her up!