Home->About Us->...from our Vet My job at the Trust is mainly giving advice and helping to prevent disease. The birds are very well kept and so ill birds are uncommon, which is how things should be. However, from time to time I do see sick birds. How do we tell they're sick, and how do we proceed from there?
Birds are difficult patients, they just don't like showing they are ill. Everything about them is designed to hide signs of illness. This is a natural adaptation so they don't get picked out and eaten by a larger predator. However, it doesn't help in captivity. So the first step is spotting the bird is ill.
In the early stages, these signs can be very subtle; the bird doesn't normally perch like that or in that place, it normally eats a little more, or you don't get attacked when you go in the aviary! In the case of flying birds, a weight change may be picked up as these birds are weighed once or twice a day. A difference of a quarter of an ounce from what the bird should weigh may indicate serious disease.
In essence, know your bird! Because, if you miss this stage of illness and you find the bird showing overt signs of being sick (collapsed or fluffed up) then it is very ill indeed and often close to death. We would rather act too quickly than wait till this stage.
The next thing to do is to stabilise the bird; basically get it warm and give fluids. It will then be better able to stand us handling and examining it.
Diagnosing different diseases in birds can be very hard (that's my excuse!) as so many illnesses look just the same. Very few have unique features (an exception being wing-tip oedema syndrome where the end of the wing swells before falling off). This is why we like to do a full clinical examination (starting at the head and checking body condition, i.e. how fat the bird is, as well as feeling the crop and the abdominal organs plus wings, legs, and feathering) and often perform many tests. This much handling can be very stressful to a sick bird so we often do a lot of procedures under anaesthesia. We can then do as we wish while the bird is blissfully unaware.
What tests do we do?
We will usually take blood samples to assess red cells (for anaemia) and white cells (for infections) and to check the status of the liver and kidneys. Mute (faecal) samples may be examined for parasites and bacteria.
It is very common to X-ray birds not only to look for fractured bones but also to assess the health of internal organs (checking for enlargements of the liver and spleen, or looking for foreign bodies in the gut).
We can also perform endoscopy; this is where we put an endoscope inside the bird and directly observe the gut or the respiratory system or internal organs. If there's a hole we put a scope in it, if there isn't we can make one! The endoscope also enables us to collect biopsies.
All these tests are performed as quickly as possible after finding the sick bird. Sound a bit over the top? Not really; diseases in birds progress much quicker than in dogs or cats so we don't have time to assess one set of results before deciding which test to do next. We just have to do the lot.
I hope this gives you some idea as to what happens when we find a sick bird and why we're so keen to prevent illness rather than treat it.
John Chitty BVetMed CertZooMed MRCVS

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