Amazon Feet Help

[Dodger]

Wow I was always told leather could potentially be harmful to birds. So I may have to invest in some leather as-well!

I am not sure where we'd be able to get Vet Wrap up here in Alaska but I could check around to a few places. May just have to buy some online.

[entrancedbymyGCC]

If you have a tack and feed shop, they usually stock it. Some pet stores as well -- and any vet might be willing to sell you a roll.

[pfinarffle]

hi dodger,

i'd posted a while back about pressure sores on the bottoms of our adopted senegal's feet. when we first got him about a year ago his legs/feet were very pink, like baby bird pink. we'd taken him to the avian vet three times (for what turned out to be a yeast infection) and she never noticed his feet. this summer he got comfortable enough with me that i've been able to handle him however i need to. as part of his training, i'd been teaching him to lay on his back in my hand, and that's when i saw the sores on the bottoms of his feet (there are photos in that other thread, "pododermatitis"). he had been falling frequently a year ago, hence my taking him to the vet. since the yeast infection was treated, however, no more falls. however, his feet took a lot longer to get better. they're still not entirely normal.

in the end, i hypothesized that he was/is vitamin a deficient. vitamin a deficiency is by far one of the most common health problems with birds. and it leads to a variety of issues including yeast infection and other infections. pododermatitis is another one of those problems. vitamin a is crucial to synthesize skin cells, so it all makes sense to me. thus, i'd also carefully watch your amazon's diet carefully. is he/she being picky with food, or does he/she seem to get enough beta carotene/vitamin a? i noticed you said your bird was in the middle-age range for amazons. our bird too is in the mid-life stages (17 years old). i suspect that the older a bird is, the more noticeable any vitamin deficiencies become.

in our case, after careful observation, i realized our adopted bird wasn't eating veggies nor any pellets. he'd play with them, but never actually consumed them. i've been giving him tiny doses of beta carotene supplements meant for humans (you can't overdose on beta carotene), and his feet are starting to scale again and look the way they should. am still working on getting him to eat veggies, but it's rough. btw, the vetrap suggestion and foot creme were great as well. we just took down the vetrap yesterday as our guy's feet have been doing so much better. he kept trying to eat the foot creme, though i tried training him not to.

[Dodger]

Thanks for the suggestion!

Gort is VERY picky about what he eats. My Green Wing Macaw; Herbie on the otherhand is not... That is if he isnt fed junkfood (he doesnt like junkfood and will only eat pellets, fruits and veggies). Gort will not eat really anything healthy for him. The only thing healthy we can get him to eat is grapes and a very limited variety of veggies. We tried a pelleted diet with him and have failed miserably at that. I've been trying to train him to eat pellets... Meaning whenever he does his tricks, I would try to give him a pellet as a treat... Wont work. If I put even a few pellets in his food, he wont touch the dish at-all and then go to the bottom of his cage and pick through food that he's dropped.

I will try to get some Vitamin A supplements and see if it helps. I feed my Amazon; ZuPreem as a staple and Nutriberries with fresh veggies and fruits - the veggies and fruits are VERY limited as he doesnt like a whole lot. He's more of a peanut eater... He likes junkfood :/ So maybe that has something to do with it?

[pfinarffle]

make sure you use beta carotene supplementation, not vitamin a. you can overdose any animal on vitamin a. if you give him beta carotene, however, his body will convert some of that into whatever vitamin a he needs.

the supplement i've been using is quite frankly a p.i.t.a. to deal with. it comes in veggie "gel" capsule and the beta carotene is suspended in some sort of an oil (beta carotene and vitamin a are both fat soluble). so i don't want to overdo it because of all the fat. the oil suspension is also really orange and colors anything it touches yellow. anyway, i cut open each capsule, pull the contents up into a 1 ml syringe, and give our bird like 0.2 ml of it daily. i had started him out on a full capsule to try to get things moving along much more quickly knowing you can't overdose on it etc. but now i want to make sure he doesn't gain weight (have been weighing him daily and he's been fine). obviously no one should be doing this for the rest of the bird's life! the key will be in both of us finding beta carotene rich foods our birds love to eat.

anything very orange in color has beta carotene in it. it's fall now, so stock up on sweet potato or pumpkin or carrot and offer steamed/boiled specimens daily (cooking releases more beta carotene). i haven't done a very good job of this, but some birds simply need to be given all their foods in a mash (where you blend the foods all together to keep them from picking out the junk bits ). there are many recipes for mash online (perhaps even here at pf?-- can't hurt to solicit people's recipes here ). you can make a big batch at once, freeze them in ice cube trays, and defrost daily for meals. i think peewee would eat a mash out of desperation. i just don't have a food processor, so i'm a bit limited with the blending part of things for the time being.

goldenfeast also makes this great dehydrated veggie powder that you can bake or blend into other foods your bird will eat. i get mine from the bird safe store: http://birdsafestore.com/gardenpowder.aspx but it might be available elsewhere. it smells amazing, like a dried salad. chock full of nutrients!

you can also try sprinkling a bit of cayenne pepper onto your bird's foods as that too has vitamin a and makes foods more palatable for them.

another really helpful thing for peewee was sprouting. he was somewhat of a seed junkie coming to us, so we used that against him by sprouting all the seeds he once enjoyed dry. sure enough, he eats his "veggies" this way (as do most birds in the wild)!

lastly, i'm reading up on this diet thing more and more. there's a great book called "what happened to my peanuts?" by gudrun maybaum. i also got an amazing cookbook by the folks i adopted my sennie from, phoenix landing, called "nourish to flourish" http://phoenixlanding.org/books.html (top book). can't find that elsewhere. lots of different types of recipes, from mashes to birdie breads to treats, all made of healthy natural ingredients with the goal of making it nutritionally balanced. i believe there's also a great dvd by clark and porter (also viewable on that site) that guides you through a lot of this in video.

keep us posted and good luck!

[Dodger]

haha yeah I wasnt going to go out to the store just looking for "vitamin A" supplements. I just couldnt think of the name at the time of posting.

So what Im going to do is get some more rope perches, get some vetwrap for the harder perches, remove his calcium perch and then try the Vit. A supplement... Still cant think of it at the moment... It's 4am here Then get him some yummy food to mash up and hope that he eats it.

I will definitely keep everyone posted.

Thanks for all the great tips and help!

[Anna]

I also came to think about vitamin A deficiency, it´s commonly occuring with amazons and other South American birds who need more vitamin A than other species.

You can also use olive oil or some other cooking oil to keep his feet smooth.

[MandyG]

Great information pfinarffle! I had no idea the kind of problems that a vitamin A deficiency could cause. When my conure went for her check up the vet mentioned she may have a vit a deficiency but it ended up she didn't thankfully. I'll definitely be increasing the orange veggies in my flock's diet!

[Jenny]

my thanks too, pfinarffle. I so appreciate this kind of information! I'm definitely getting the cookbook you recommended.

[Dodger]

So giving raw veggies (ie.) carrots - without boiling/steaming them would still hold the Vit. A correct? I know Gort will eat small amounts of carrots. Better than nothing