QUICK HELP!!

30 Sep 2009, 18:49

well whoever said bad luck comes in threes - for me its looking for like fours.

in short - orangebreast hen. noticed she looked a bit slow and fluffed up this morning as the two OB hens are usually the tamest and fly over to me for breakdfast cucumber every morning.

so i got home from work and caught her. only to discover she has some sort of hardened bloody mess coming from her vent. i can't for the life of me work out what it is and i didn't think it wise to try and remove it manually.

i have placed her in a small box indoors with water.

any advice? i didn't think blood was a usual sign of egg binding, unless the egg has broken? i have a feeling she is not long for this world...

30 Sep 2009, 19:04

Do you have a hospital cage that you can place the bird in?? If so, place it in a smaller cage and place a light onto it. I have a red heat lamp. The bird maybe egg bound, but I am no expert. As I have said in another post, the sick birds respond well to heat. See what happens and good luck

30 Sep 2009, 19:50

my "hospital cage" is currently my "quarantine cage" and has inhabitants.

its in a travel box. in a very quiet but heated room in the house. do i need more heat than room temperature?

01 Oct 2009, 11:34

Try putting a low wattage globe in a bed lamp right next to the carry box she is in for a bit more heat, and make sure she has plenty of water with maybe a little "spark" in and cross your fingers.
Cause it does sound like it could be an egg broken internally.
LML

01 Oct 2009, 20:34

thanks for the help guys. sadly she didn't make it through the night.

pretty sure it was an internally broken eggbinding. she was actually my tamest little finch. was not far off getting her feeding from my hand.....

over the years i've had turtles, lizards, fowl, newts, frogs and always enjoyed exceptional longevity in my charges.

this hobby is damn heartbreaking!!!

01 Oct 2009, 20:44

Aint that the truth? I lost 3 birds in the last week...On the plus side, my quails hatched 8 young today from 12 eggs. Hopefully there are more to come tomorrow.

01 Oct 2009, 21:06

did you do a autopsy ? Everyone you do you learn a little.Its one way of knowing if she was egg bound,And not having some other unknown desease or course of death.May not be for eveyone if you have a weak stomach.

01 Oct 2009, 21:32

good advice Gomer, have done that a couple of times over the years. certaily worth considering if you have a few birds fall off the perch in a short period of time

02 Oct 2009, 07:54

Well I'm so close to chucking it all in...Another Gouldian Hen sick on the floor - she won't last the day. Plus my pair of scarlet parrots are all fluffed up. They don't look good either.

All birds have been wormed before this. Could it possibly have something to do with having shell grit floors instead of concrete? I have a concrete paved floor underneath but decided to cover it with grit on advice. Should I remove the grit? I know a lot of these birds like to peck around the floor so could they have picked up a bug with all this nasty weather we've had in Adelaide lately? Anyone else from Adelaide had a similar problem?

Sigh...

02 Oct 2009, 09:15

Ive had a female emblema die in the main aviary a couple of weeks ago, think that might be due to the male emblema preferring the floor and the hen roosting on the floor at night with him, she probably caught a chill with the awful weather. Male emblema now inside and seems fine, just seems to prefer the aviary floor, so he will stay inside till the weather gets better. Everyone else in the main aviary is fine.
Also had one young gouldian die. The young gouldians are in a totally different area of the garden, so just one of those things I reckon, all the others are fine.