Sick Bird

I keep a pair of cockatiels. The oldest is a cinnamon tiel who will be eighteen in a couple of days. Her name is Zimt, which is “cinnamon” auf Deutsch.

My birds tend to observe holidays, albeit in their own ways. Zimt hatched on a Valentine’s Day, laid her first egg on a Christmas Day (the egg was sterile as there was no cock about), and later, with her mate, Barley, had a brood that began to hatch on a Mother’s Day. Barley lived to be only ten, and in keeping with this bird family’s tradition died on a Christmas Day (2001). So of course, after six weeks or so, I felt so sorry for Zimt that I started looking for a companion bird. Since she was going on twelve, I didn’t want to get a chick; I wanted a tamed adult pet cockatiel. Most people aren’t likely to want to part with an adult pet, but I finally found one in Texas and one in Ohio. Or so I thought.

I booked a hotel room in Columbus and booked on down the road after work on a Friday. On Saturday morning, the couple who had the bird brought him to my room. This was not a tame bird. But I had gone all that way, and I didn’t really want to drive to Texas, so I decided to take a chance on him. He’s a feisty little guy that they said they were calling “Skippy,” although he seemed oblivious to his name. Looking back on the experience, my best guess is that they were breeders with some excess birds they were looking to dump and that he never had been a pet and never had a name. Although it’s hard to determine the age of a tiel, my best guess is that he was no more than two years old and not the six that they said he was.

But it all worked out okay. I kept him in a separate cage until I could have him checked by the vet, who gave him a clean bill of health. He’s a good bird, and while he doesn’t like to be handled, he doesn’t bite as he did when I first got him. His name is Beefy, which he does recognize and which is in keeping with my tendency to name birds after edible substances. Apart from having to be retrieved from the occasional birdventure into the kitchen, he’d been a pretty low maintenance kind of guy these past six years. And then he vomited. A lot. He was vomiting everything he ate and, receiving no nutritional value from his food, quickly became weak and huddled in a corner at the bottom of his cage.

Birds tend to hide their illnesses, and they are very good at it. In the wild, a bird that appears ill or weak is the prime target for a predator, so a sick bird pretends to be normal as long as it has the strength to do so. By the time they look sick, they’re very sick. Last Thursday, my vet was lined up for procedures all day, so I found another vet who specializes in exotics (that’d be pretty much everything but cats, dogs, and large livestock), who would take Beefy as a drop-off and look at him between his other appointments. True to his nature, Beefy dug deep to find a bit of strength and looked just fine when I uncovered his cage at the vet’s office. The good news was that he hadn’t vomited during the thirty-five minute ride in the car. Nor has he vomited since. The vet did bloodwork and a crop wash. Beefy’s liver enzymes were elevated, which could be caused by a wide range of conditions, and he has a bacterial infection. So I’m giving him antibiotics twice a day (loves the sweet, sticky, grapey medium; hates the handling) and keeping him relatively quiet. Next Monday we’re going back to do another liver enzyme test to see if they’re still elevated. Fingers crossed.