First Bird In-Patient - Patched Up A Macaw

Our first injured bird came in, and it went well! There is a nearby bird rescue, and one of their Military Macaws got attacked by his cage mate. He was missing a piece of his eyelid and all the feathers over his tail, plus had some various cuts and bruises. He was quite gentle to work with, however, and I daringly admitted him to the hospital. Our first avian admit!

I'm not great at wound management in general, even in dogs and cats. I tend to fumble through, with lots of direction from the other vets. For some reason I have a difficult time understanding the concepts, even though wound healing was drilled into me in vet school. Something about making the connection between lecture material and physically working with a wound right the hell in front of me has a hard time inside my brain. So, naturally, our first "sick bird" was a wound. But hey, could have been way worse!

I've read plenty about intranasal sedation, but when I was on Wildbase, I never saw it done. So I cruised VIN, checked my Avian textbooks, picked a dose, and went for it. Boom, midazolam and butorphanol right in the nostrils. No one else had seen it done before, either, so then we stood around with the lights dimmed waiting to see what happened. After about five minutes, we had a pretty snoozy parrot! The other vets were impressed.

I flushed out his wounds, applied some silver sulfadiazine and some Tegaderm, and that was pretty much it. It turned out I couldn't do much with the eyelid, though I wasn't sure until we sedated him (and the owner didn't care about cosmetics). Sent him home on antibiotics and meloxicam, and he's doing great.

Here's his good side.