Intestinal problem, watery poop

[Pajarita]

Liz8200, you pm'd me quoting my answer on another post and asking if you should give the bird the metronidazole again but the other post was about a bird with diarrhea and not watery poop which is different. Just in case you are not clear on the difference, let me give you a little poopology lesson.

Birds poop consists of three different elements: urine (clear liquid which usually makes a wet stain around the poop -it's the same as human urine, basically), urates (white liquid that dries up powdery -this is what protein becomes after metabolization) and feces (the little 'wormy' looking stuff that could be dark green when they eat seeds and fresh produce or brown when they eat pellets -it can also be colored by food like when they eat pomegranate, beets, blackberries, etc).

Now, when you have diarrhea, the feces are so soft and liquidy that they end up mixing with the urine and urates and you have a large, almost uniformly colored, soft 'creamy' mass. When you have watery poop, this means that the urine output is too large so you have a much larger wet stain as well as output of urine alone (no feces and, sometimes, very little to no urates) but the feces still have 'shape'.

The urine should be clear as water, if it's colored, there is a problem. The ureates should be white or a VERY light cream color, if they are darker, there is a problem. The feces should be either green (medium dark to dark) or brown in the case of pellets but, if they are maroon or darker, there is a problem.

The first poop of the day is always bigger and softer than the following ones so one cannot say that a bird has diarrhea based on the 'morning bomb', you need to look at the other ones during the day.

When birds first eat a fresh food diet with fruit on a daily basis after been on mostly seeds or pellets, they will start off with more urine than normal but they 'adjust' it as time goes by although some species will always have more urine than others (like GCCs, for example).

Feces that look spongy (the feces look inflated and have little holes in it like a Swiss cheese) means the bird has gas so there is a problem.

Poop does not really smell bad so, if there is an unpleasant odor to them, there is a problem.

So, going by this guidelines, tell me exactly what your bird poop looks like (if you can post a picture, better still).

Unless he kept the bird in for the test for hours and hours (it requires limiting water intake and testing at precise times), your avian vet did not do an insipidus test (the regular indicator of diabetes mellitus is the glucose level in the blood but it doesn't change with insipidus -thus, the special test).

[Cedardave]

By no means is this a cure to the issue at hand, and since I am not an avian vet...but an experianced owner,caregiver and Quality breeder of all types of birds heres my thought.Please feel free to add yours.It sounds like this has been a confusing and ongoing issue for some time now.Firstly without judgement ,it shouldnt take this long to resolve this.What Im hearing is somesort of stomach or intestinal issue.Probiotics have been suggested here and there.Medication that tasted bad has offered little success.So my course of action from the beginning would have been a yougurt with the probiotics added to an improved diet.If this bird is sleeping alot and relatively inactive,he needs an immediate boost.Im going to suggest adding canteloupe ,and pineaple tidbits along with a couple tablespoons of yogurt.The yogurt may help settle any stomach discomfort and allow for the take up of natural sugars from the fruit.In nature these guys never have to endure the medications we inflict on them in captivity.Solets try something more natural and less harmful.The apple cider vinegar is also a great idea, but how to get it into him becomes the challenge.Is stressing the bird to its max worth the benefit.For this I would offer perhaps some coconut water or fruit juice added to his water and sneek a drop or two of the apple cider vinegar in.Do not use any other type of vinegar.Best of luck.

[Cedardave]

i wanted to add if do try the yogurt and fruit , perhaps add a granola or porrage to increase his fiber intake as well.

[liz8200]

Thanks for telling me about the bird poop. I was starting to get confused about the proper look of a conjures poop. I have a cockatel and her poop is different than his.

His poop is watery. The 2 other parts are normal the urine is the problem. The urine goes our past the poop.
I just remembered one of my Cocketiles had a big urine problem a year ago. She was drinking a lot of water and she was shooting the urine when she went to poop. She got over that on her own.
Pokeys watery poop is different I'm not seeing him drink alot of water. That has not changed.
I made the crop food Wolf said to feed him. He's not excited about it, I put some seed on top of it and he ate the seed and a little of the crop. Should that be dry, mine is moist, mushy. I am giving him 2 drops of apple vinegar in his bottled water.

I will get some yogurt tomorrow. I do give him granola. Can someone tell me what a bird probiotic is? If I put a few drops of apple vinegar in his water will that be good enough for the vinegar?

I did start thinking maybe I should give him the antibiotic the vet gave him that helps with inflammation again.

This issue has been going on for to long. I feel very bad, I love my bird and I dont want him to feel bad. He seemed fine other than the watery poop for a long time. Now I am totally focused on getting him well.

I will take some pic of his poop and put them on here.

I am

[Wolf]

The gloop should be moist but not watery.
I am still researching into the case of your birds problem and I have a question. When asked what you feed him your reply was seeds and what you eat and then there was a short list of vegetables. My question concern the what you eat portion. Would you elaborate on what foods you eat, please. Does the foods that you eat contain salt or sugar? Did the bird eat any foods containing either salt or sugar?

[liz]

POOPOLOGY I like this thread. I did not know what the three things were but accepted that they were all doing the same thing so it must be normal.

You need to change this thread to Poopology and keep it as a permanent thread like DIET & LIGHTING. It would be much faster to refer someone to a thread than to go over it all over again.

Poopology - only you could come up with that word.

[Pajarita]

Actually, Liz, the 'poopology' was stolen from somebody else.

I would not use yogurt or granola. Yogurts don't really have enough live bacteria both in numbers or strains to provide any benefit to a bird which is not even a mammal (no enzymes to digest any milk product). Even humans don't benefit much from them because, if you look at the Activia ads, you need to eat two yogurts a day for 4 weeks to begin to see any results in your digestion.

I would also not feed it granola unless you make it from scratch yourself.

I would NOT use a bottle for a bird with watery poop. I don't like bottles for birds, period, but much less for a bird with digestive problems. They are almost impossible to clean properly, they are completely unnatural to a bird and they only provide one single drop at a time - no good for an animal that is not hardwired to drink a lot or often. Please put a bowl of water out for him and use 21 drops in 3 to 4 liquid ounces (look at a large perfume bottle, they usually have 3.3 oz in them, and use that as reference). I use 2 tablespoons to a gallon (so it's 460 drops to 64 oz) and this comes up to 21 drops for every 3 oz. I've never had any problem having the birds drink water with ACV (mind you, the apple cider vinegar needs to be the organic, unfiltered, unpasteurized one, the kind that has the 'mother' in it), all of mine seem to like it just fine but, if you see he is not drinking as much, add a drop or two of organic honey to it.

You can try the metronidazole again but polyuria (large urine output) is not usually caused by inflammation or infection (it can, but your avian vet must have determined that your bird does not have an infection from the blood work -no elevated white cell count). In my personal experience (not large because I've only had two birds that had this problem), it's usually caused by liver or kidney malfunction -at least, that was the reason for mine. I took in an 18 year old cockatiel with the most outrageous polyuria and polydipsia (drinking too much water). I would put four layers of paper in his cage in the evening and, the next morning, there would be a HUGE stain and his urine had gone through all four layers. His kidneys and liver were almost in complete failure according to his blood tests results (kidney malfunction comes up in a regular avian chem panel but you need to do a bile acids for the liver) and the vet recommended I put him down because he was not going to last two months. He lived 20 months. I did manage to reduce both his polyuria and his polydipsia and his liver values did improve a bit but there is really nothing you can do about the kidneys except give them low protein and keep them super hydrated (and that's why you need to give him the water in a bowl and not a bottle as well as low protein fresh food which has a lot of water content). The other bird had spongy poop as well as the polyuria and was treated with both antibiotics as well as probiotics and ACV (it was an Umbrella cockatoo and she got better).

So, what I recommend is:
- get a bile acids test done and, if the values are normal, get an insipidus test done.
- water in a bowl with ACV and a couple of tablespoons of aloe vera jui(ce (not the gel and only the juice from the inner filet, not the whole leaf one).
- change diet to low protein and high moisture with emphasis on organic (the kidneys and liver are a filter so the less it has to filter, the better) and fruits rich in vit C. No people food, no animal protein whatsoever and nothing high in oxalates.
- and, in case it is the liver or the kidneys, supplement with milk thistle, dandelion root, methionine, vit B6, quercetin and L carnitine. Look at the dosage for a human and using an average human weight of 150 lb, calculate the dosage for his weight (if you have a problem, let me know how much he weights and what is the concentration on the supplements and I'll figure it out for you but I use 3 capsules of milk thistle and 1 of dandelion root and methionine for a bowl that holds about 1 lb of gloop and 1 capsule of the others every other day)

But I would get the bile acids test done asap.

If it sounds complicated, it's because it is. It's not easy caring for a sick bird for the simple reason that lots and lots of medicines we have for dogs and cats don't work on them so it falls to the owner to use non-traditional methods.

Oh, and how do you supplement calcium and D3?

[liz8200]

I feed my bird Pokey the glop and he ate like 3 tablespoons full. I gave him some yogurt. I have never given him meat. If I'm eating eggs I give a little of that. I give him spaghetti, brokli, carrots, He loves bread. I give him salad, pieces of cookies, bell pepper. apples, bananas. cheese, pizza crust, I dont give anything real sweet or salty. If I do give him something salty I lick or wipe the salt or grease off before I give it to him.
I left a message for his Vet to call me 2 times and he has not called me back.

[Wolf]

I feed my bird Pokey the glop and he ate like 3 tablespoons full. I gave him some yogurt. I have never given him meat. If I'm eating eggs I give a little of that. I give him spaghetti, brokli, carrots, He loves bread. I give him salad, pieces of cookies, bell pepper. apples, bananas. cheese, pizza crust, I dont give anything real sweet or salty. If I do give him something salty I lick or wipe the salt or grease off before I give it to him.
I left a message for his Vet to call me 2 times and he has not called me back.

I would not give him any of the cookies, only whole wheat bread very sparingly,, no cheese of pizza crust or anything that you have to clean the salt off of. I understand that these are all foods that he like a lot and would do just about anything to have, but sadly the symptoms that he has are the same as are caused by possible liver or kidney failure, diabetes and malnutrition. The malnutrition is the easiest to fix. If it is diabetes then it depends on which one he has, but I don't think that they can be fixed, although he could live for quite some time if he receives the proper treatments in time, but there are no guarantees. Liver malfunction, Pajarita has treatments that can help him live a long time and I don't know about kidney malfunction.
The worst part of this is that all of these thing can usually be prevented with a good diet and their is so much misinformation floating about concerning diet that most parrot owners don't know what is or is not a good diet for their birds. Even many vets fall into this same category because they don't know either. I have two avian medical texts copied from online and there is only one chapter in each of then that is devoted to avian nutrition and the majority of that information is on chickens followed by pigeons. There are over 350 different species of parrots each one with different dietary requirements and they get less than 1/2 of a chapter in the medical text on nutrition. It is absurd and truly an untenable situation.

[liz]

Liz#, read the thread DIET where they were teaching me.