Sick bird

[marie83]

Keep us updated please. I hope he recovers quickly.

[Pajarita]

Cephalexin and not enrofloxacin, eh? That's a new one to me. Not that cephalexin is not good, it is! but my experience with it has been more for skin problems than as a wide spectrum for birds.

[Hookturn]

Tests came back and JJ has an upper respiratory infection. Doc said that the antibiotics shoukd clear it up.

[Wolf]

Hoping for a quick recovery.

[marie83]

Glad you found out what is wrong so it can be treated. It's possibly too soon for a noticeable improvement but how is he today?

[Hookturn]

I don't see any change in him yet. He lost a little more weight.

[Pajarita]

Keep him extra warm (85-95 birds body temperature is much higher than ours and they need high heat to get better when sick), in a quiet place (stress is a killer) and feed him higher carbs (bread, white rice) and food rich in vit C (citrus) and betacarotene (carrots, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, dark leafy greens, etc). And, after the treatment, give him probiotics to get his gut flora back to a good level.

The question now is why did he get the infection. Is he eating enough food rich in betacarotene? Is there anything that could be giving him chronic stress? Is he clipped? Because birds only get respiratories from lack of vit A, stress or an underworking respiratory system so take this as a sign that you need to re-evaluate his diet and living conditions.

[Hookturn]

I was concerned with why he got it too. I feed my version of gloop and it has lots of carrots in it. He gets roudybush pellets before bed.

He is clipped but I can't think of anything that would be stressing him out. He has a large cage which is by a window. Solar schedule. And lots of out of cage time.

[Pajarita]

Well, the clipping could have done it. Aside from the emotional and psychological stress of having their only response to danger taken away from them, birds respiratory system is very different from ours, we have flexible lungs (birds' are rigid) that are 'bellowed' by our diaphragm (birds have lungs AND air sacs and the air moves through them by their respiration and not the diaphragm). Furthermore, there is one pair of air sacs that is only fully functional when the bird flies so a bird that cannot fly will end up with a semi-atrophied pair of air sacs and it's a known fact in medicine that any organ that has any degree of atrophy will be more prone to disease.

Do you supplement calcium and some source of vit D3? Because calcium has a direct effect on lungs, too...

[Hookturn]

Just to be clear I didn't clip him. He came to me that way. I want him to be able to fly so badly but he hasn't had his first molt yet.

I do not supplement at all. What would you recommend?