Budgerigar-ing

In third year clinical studies, one of our labs was about bird handling and the avian clinical exam. They brought in four or five travel cages full of budgies from the local aviary.

After a briefing, we were sent off to grab a budgie each and start practicing. Since they are tiny, we wanted to be careful, but they also turn into little flapping panicking escape-machines when you try to get them out of the cage. We had to reach in through the hand-sized flap on the side of the box, isolate a bird, and sort of (gently) squash it against a wall or floor so you could get a grip on it. Then, hopefully, the bird didn't wriggle out while you tried to one-handedly extract it from the cage.

Birds don't have diaphragms; the only way they can breathe is by using the motion of their chests. That means if you just grip them like a soda can then they will quietly die on you while you're not looking. The way you actually hold birds is by putting your hand around the back of their heads and squeezing their mandibles. This image from google sort of gives you the idea.

Since they are tiny, they have really fast hearts. I believe the normal is around 350bpm and they can get up to 600bpm. When you put your stethoscope on them, they are so little that the bell pretty much covers up the entire thorax. The prof told us to listen to both sides of their lungs, but it was really more like sliding it 2mm towards the other side. It's so fast, it sounds like a machine--bdrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

If you lose your grip, which is easy to do because it is a weird grip, they will bite you. I did a lot of this while I was working at the aviary, and for something so tiny their bite hurts. Those beaks are perfectly suited for clamping down on things. 

One of the girls in my lab group was rather notorious for being timid around the animals and messing up. She also giggled a lot at inappropriate things. Therefore it wasn't too unexpected when I heard some shrieking, and turn to see that her bird had twisted its head and bitten her. Her response? She reflexively chucks the budgie. Then giggles. Fortunately, her friend was a bit more on top of things and clamped her free hand over the bird before it could go flying off, and the budgie was returned to the original girl without any fuss (apart from more shrieking and giggling, that is). One of my friends in the class below me has told me that a similar incident happened in their class the next year, only that time the bird actually did get away and started flapping around the room. She said they had to quickly shut all the doors, the prof grabbed the long net, and had to run around the room trying to catch it.