All Creatures Fill (Birds)

This. From the county can really help and can. Perhaps do this spectacularly beat Can birds of every kind and description or favorite house. Cats no matter what kind of bird you live here. And yet it only shows you know how to keep CAN and DO realize that veterinarians can do something to help. Dr. Ivan Reitman is a New Jersey veterinarian who for 25 years has had birds as a side specialty at his Collingswood office. He sees referrals from up to 100 miles away. The colorful murals on the exterior of the clinic a reminder to all that a bird is just as welcome as a dog or cat. I started with birds many years ago as part of my early training because we found that people called us and said they were born to die they could get no one to look at it. Many people feel that just because they have a

small bird no one knows how to take care of it. There are veterinarians like myself and many throughout the state of New Jersey who have a site specialty of the care of pet birds. You should call and ask to see if you're a veteran and will treat your bird Well we're going to show today that you can have the same sophisticated blood tests x rays surgery and examinations that dog cat or human can. And Bird medicine really. While it may vary in size and time it is basically the same as any medicine. OK now because of the small size of these birds I wear some go. Where is my flying glands on my head. Nothing very fancy but it helps me because they are very tiny and sit down. People always ask if you can handle a bird or want to die if you handle birds or really if they are in good health. Quite hearty But before we do touch the bird we examine the cage and we look at the cage contents. What we are looking at here was something called the droppings which are the little matter that was in the bottom of the cage that can tell us a lot about the birds health the

birds uniquely has solid white urine and liquid bowels or semi-liquid valves that we see an absence of the bowels of the color of the bowels. This can tell us an awful lot about their general health. Now if we reach in that case I might add before this. I've taken a very complete history from the client. I found out all about that various diet. Exercise. Many times we have a small movie we show our clients on proper care. Also get them literature. Many people unfortunately buy it pet bird. They love it. They don't understand anything about its care and its nutrition. So we spent a lot of time discussing the fact that birds not only seems like you see in the cage here but overall I should have fresh fruits vegetables eggs and other is almost the same. You can eat it they can eat it. No bird was born to live only on dreidels seeds from a box. They must have a variety. I going to carefully pick up one of the birds here. Now they may inject a little bit but usually they don't object for too long.

I might add catch all of our viewers this way The only difference is when we have a large bird all we use is a little towel and I will have one of my assistants come in and help me with it because it is a large hamazon parent or McChord takes a lot more and as we go through the examination. I may use a lens in the first of all you going to see the problem that the bird was presented for and I don't know if this will show on camera. This bird has an enormous swollen chest area. The first thing we notice that this looks like fat. It feels like fat and it's part of our examination. We weigh all of our birds. All this is a small laboratory scale little pauperis smaller Veras and a special little perch you get a big bird. It's the right way and that way when we raise this bird as I did just a moment ago we saw that it way. So three grams sixty three grams is double its normal part. He weighs 28 to 30 grams which is less than one ounce. This is like a 150 pound person that would weigh 300 pounds. So we know this bird is suffering

from overweight. We think largely the overweight problem this one is lack of exercise and too much access to food. Therefore this is why this bird has an enormous fatty growth. But as we go through our examination we just don't stop and look at the obvious. We start right at the beginning we could examine your bird's eyes as we do with your dog or cat and look at the Amish school and study their eyes. You get diseases and the parakeet the same as you do in any person. They get all serious injuries and you treat them much the same way. We then look at the nostrils which are very tiny on a parakeet but tell us a lot about disease. We see a lot of respiratory and sinus disease there. We check the nostrils carefully. We open the mouth either with a little inside peek on the end and that's where I used my little magnifying. So you can see inside the mouth and they don't object to this at all. Some of them even say off or on. Not often you can use it that something special likes the same as any other exam.

Looking here with a special light and look through the magnifying lens here and I can see the burns the roof of it's mouth. It's time we look for diseases that may have ulcers infections. No different than anyone else. As we go down we see then this enormous tumor. You realize this is an enormous fatty growth which is taking probably many years to accumulate. Unfortunately I mean going down and actually feel the bird's abdomen which is very tiny. We check its feet to see if they're healthy will sometimes spread out the wings and may even just trans Allouni with them which means putting a light right through the wings a little for Parakey and look for a part of the parasites or any other abnormality. Now this bird is not eating we have methods of feeding birds mostly as well. A bird doesn't eat. It's important if your girl doesn't eat for more than two days they can be dead. Is the cause. So what we showed briefly is how we can do something the way it feels. I just show here these are this is much too little too long. This is a special nutrient solution. It's just therapeutic nutrition for sick birds. We mix it with water. We put it in a tube like

this except for a Parakey this is a size we would use for a large macaw that chose better on TV. And. This would be passed into the birds by simply opening the mouth and we do this very easily passing it into the bird's crop. We can then feed this bird for many many days or many weeks until it gets better and gets over its disease. This can be done with a very thin two for the Parakey a very thick heavy one for the large parrot or a cough. We mentioned briefly about that we can X-ray. This case for free my X-ray after my initial examination to see if this tumor is truly invasive or part of the birds outside of where it's inside. What I'm going to show you here are two similar X-rays taken in two human size two similar sized Amazon parrots. And this is a rather fairly normal X-ray showing the normal air sacs. Birds have very large air sacs this is what makes them very light so they can fly. And this also makes a very nice contrast for X-rays where we can see the

top part of the X-ray right here. This is the heart shadow. This is a narrow waist line call this which leads to a fairly normal sized liver and this bird. This is. And you can see the we can also see many other things on the X-ray but this is what's important in this one. We're going to contrast this with an X-ray of another bird which is actually quite similar in size which will show the difference. And this bird has a liver disease you will see here that the Harshad was somewhat obliterated. Hard to see that normal waistline that we just spoke about is not present. And the liver is enormous filling the entire lower half of the bird and we can barely even see that there air sacs present. This bird is in fact infected with a very enlarged liver and probably has a tumor or other severe liver disease. So there you have it. Birds are able to receive the kind of veterinary care available to household pets. And. Like other pets you can avoid most problems if you take care of them properly.