New Camera

I love using film cameras. I have a thirty-some year old Olympus fully manual SLR that I understand. It has the usual controls: shutter speed and aperture setting. Film speed. Nice light meter. Great lens. And a few additional lenses, and some close-up rings. It's analog: you turn things to change the focus and speed. Analog is something I can relate to by feel rather than simply read and memorize. I'm not so hot with digital cameras. Yet, I bought one.

I was looking for a relatively inexpensive little work horse with not a lot of superfluous features, and I believe I found one in the Kodak EasyShare ZD710.

Now to see if I can upload a picture!


Ah, there she is! Meet Zimt, my eighteen year old cockatiel hen. She's a real sweetie and her birthday is Valentine's day.

Bye-Bye, Birdie

This morning my littly guy was somewhat weak, and I wondered still whether he would recover from his protracted malady. After thinking about it during the day, I recognized that he was in the trough of a cycle, and each high had hit about the same level of recovery while each decline had gone progressively lower, so I made an appointment for what I new would be his last trip to the vet.

Tonight I bade a very fond farewell to a pathetically suffering little cockatiel. I will remember him for his cardinal and monkey mimicry, his energy, and his lack of self pity. His name was Beefy.

"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself."--D. H. Lawrence

Bird Update 3

That poor little guy!

We went back for Beefy's second shot on March 13 and nearly lost him. Apparently his little liver was not producing clotting agents the way it should have been, and he just bled and bled. The vet finally got it under control and I brought the little guy back home. That'd be the bird, not the vet. Three days later, when I went to give him his meds, he fled and gently bumped into a window frame, which reopened his wound. Yikes!

No more shots for him...back to antibiotics in liquid suspension, only this one he did not tolerate well. They made him vomit (of course) and lose his voice for hours, but still when it was time to take them, he swallowed them down as best he could. He's such a little trooper, but it was heartbreaking to make him so very miserable twice every day for those two weeks.

He seemed to be improving, but last Tuesday (a belated happy April Fool's Day to all) when I got home from work, Beefy was so bedraggled that I took him for an emergency visit to the vet. No, the vet said, I wasn't overreacting; the bird looked the worst the vet had seen him. Long story short: two days in a little cubicle with pure oxygen. He's breathing a lot better now.

He wasn't tolerating the liquid meds well, and shots were out of the question since his frightful hemorrhagic episode: we were nearly out of options. Antibiotics in his drinking water seemed the only thing left, but it's the least controllable, since one can't be sure of how much he'll drink on a given day. Nonetheless, after a week on that, he seems to be doing well, with more energy than he's had in, oh, months.

The course of treatment for his bug lasts a minimum of 45 days, and we started (with the right antibiotic) on the sixth of March, so this will go on until at least the 20th of April. With all of his setbacks, probably longer. Of course, I run out of drugs early next week, so I suppose we'll be seeing the vet for a progress check soon. Fingers crossed.

Bird Update 2

A day after Beefy went off his meds, he seemed almost normal. Two days after, he was sick all over again, so back to the vet and a change of prescription. For two more weeks, he was vomiting only once every two to three days until one night he just kept going, so back to the vet again. He theorized that the bacteria were now under control, but as killing bacteria tends to encourage yeasts (a truism that I know from my own experiences with antibiotics), we should give Beefy a shot for yeast, continue the antibiotic, and give him another shot in a week's time.

That was last Thursday. The vet told me that the shot might actually cause stomach upset initially, so if the bird vomited within two days--more likely within a few hours--it would be the effect of the drug. He did vomit a small amount on the next day but has been vomit free since. Tomorrow we go back for his second injection. We may actually be on the down side of whatever this was. Yay!

And just in time: I may be starting work on Monday, which is about an hour and three quarters away from the vet, making workday appointments just about impossible.

Bird Update

Beefy is still with us. We went back to the vet yesterday to have Beefy's blood work done again, and the results were in this morning: it's normal. He's not, not yet anyway. The vet thinks that the meds may be affecting Beefy's behavior and digestion, so now that his bacterial infection is gone, we're going off the meds and I'll watch to see if he returns to his normal feisty self with normal eating habits.

I had been concerned about his pooping habits (do I sound like a mommy, or what?) these last ten days. Would've been nice if the technician who gave me the meds had told me that in addition to an antibiotic it had a motility enhancer, eh?

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.