My First Avian Clients Were A Piece Of Work

I decided I want to be an avian vet. In vet school, this idea was something like, "I want to be able to see a bird and not be afraid of it." So many vets out there refuse to see them, I figured, hey! There's a niche here waiting to be filled. So I studied our avian lectures very closely, I took avian electives, I got some experience at an aviary. When I realised how big a deal avian medicine can be, it hit home that I couldn't half-ass it--I had to know about birds, which is why vets who don't see a lot of birds often won't see any--so I also got my butt down to ExoticsCon, bought some textbooks, and started some focused studying.

The only thing left to do was, well, to actually start seeing birds. It's the only way to learn, really, especially skills like handling, physical exams, and blood draws. And answering the strange questions I never expected anyone to ask.

My sparkly exciting future full of our feathered friends dimmed a little bit when I encountered my first bird clients. Okay, they're technically the second--the first was a necropsy on an endangered duck, which I will definitely write about one of these days. But they were my first companion bird clients, and companion birds is really what I do. And boy oh boy, I definitely had a moment of, "Is this what bird people are like? I don't want fifty clients like this."

They found me by searching the AAV website, of which I am a member. This was before the newspaper article for our clinic announcing I was seeing birds, and maybe even before we got it onto the clinic website. These people managed to get onto a website mainly used by vets and look up where I work. This was slightly alarming because they kept referring to me as being "boarded" by the AAV. Er, I paid the association a membership fee and they send me a journal. Being boarded is a huge, huge ordeal involving giant scary exams, after which you are a specialist.

Anyway, they have a whole bunch of birds. The first one they brought me was a macaw. Like, pretty much the biggest companion bird there is. For my very first avian exam in real life, ever. EVER. And with technicians who hadn't handled a bird in over a decade. To top it off, these are pushy, anxious people, so their birds are pushy, anxious birds, and there's nothing as much fun as having a huge macaw lunge at you any time you get close. The owners were not impressed that I seemed "intimidated" by the birds. I wasn't, but when you've only been in practice for about 5 minutes, you don't have the hardened steel to not flinch backwards when a beak the size of your hand is snapping at you.

Once we got past the introductions, one of the very first things these people said to me is how Harrison's bird seed is actually really bad for birds and vets shouldn't be recommending it. They read it online. Luckily, they said this about two seconds before I was about to tell them to try Harrison's bird seed, so I avoided that argument. They are very proud of how rich and varied their birds' diets are--lots of fresh fruit and veggies, and seeds, and rice, and quinoa, and pasta, and... wait what? I tried to explain that a likely reason the feathers are ratty, and the stool is loose, and the beaks are flaky, is because they have (wait for it) an imbalanced diet, and I firmly suggested they at least increase the percent of formulated pellets. This lasted for all of two seconds of course, because they've been in a second time, and again proudly explained their home-made diet to me, which has zero pellets now.

Okay, so I'll never convince them to change the diet. I won't bother arguing. They also wanted me to check the loose stools, like I mentioned. I did a full faecal exam and actually came up with a diagnosis. Put up some meds for them to try. Turns out they went home and researched the drug on the internet, decided it's too dangerous, and it was far riskier to give the really-good-for-diarrhoea antibiotic than to let the birds keep having diarrhoea forever.

I spent at least an hour with these people, maybe even an hour and a half. I gave the birds tons of time to get used to my presence, the sight of the towel, me patting them, before I even started the exam. I talked with the owners about all their crazy "I read such and such online" questions. I explained everything about diet, and gave them handouts with information from trusted veterinary sources, as well as a ton of free samples of pellets and diet conversion products. Then they bitched about the bill, saying that for someone so inexperienced it should have been a lot less. Maybe, oh, $30.

They said they'd go back to their other vet. Whose history, by the way, was two, two-word lines: "[Date] Sexed - male." and "[Date] Nail trim." I was secretly relieved, because I knew it would be a headache to ever get these clients to comply with any veterinary advice.

Alas, it didn't stick. They came back a month or so later, with some more birds. This time around, they wanted me to examine a new bird, so they wouldn't have to keep it in quarantine/isolation for the full 30 days. They didn't want to do any of the bloodwork or viral testing that is recommended, and balked at the price of a hundred or two hundred dollars. They wanted to know why I couldn't just give it a "clean bill of health." I explained about asymptomatic carriers of disease, but they decided that chlamydiosis is a severe illness (one of them had caught it from a bird before), so if the bird had it, they'd be super sick by now.

That bird was strikingly sweet, and had excellent feathering and body condition. Even the owners commented on how much more quiet and docile she was compared to all their other birds. Turns out they'd only had it a week. Sigh. Can't wait to watch it slowly get more aggressive and poorly every time I see it...