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.

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...

ExoticsCon

 

When I was reading on VIN what people recommend for getting started in avian practice, the biggest answer was "Get yourself to the annual avian conference." So I did. And it was awesome.

ExoticsCon was in San Antonio this year, and it was a combination of the avian vet association, the reptile vet association, and the small mammal vet association. There were lectures for all three going on at once, so I could go to a half hour about avian viruses, then switch to a case study of cancer in a hamster, then check out research on reptilian pain perception, if I wanted. I was worried the experience would be too similar to school--flashbacks to 8 hour days of lecture--but it was SO much more fun. All the pressure of exams and assignments was gone, and I could pick what I wanted to learn and when. If I didnt want to go to anything for an hour, I didn't have to. But I had the opposite problem: I was usually choosing between two or even three simultaneous lectures that I wanted to see. And there were some big names there. I went to talks by people like Brian Speer and Thomas Tully--guys who wrote the textbooks on avian medicine.

My hotel. I was very important, being a 

doctor and all. 

I made some friends, too. Everyone was so easy to talk to, happy to give advice and interested to meet a new grad. I had my "first time attendee" badge and that made for a good icebreaker topic. Even before that, five minutes off the plane and standing in line for a taxi, I met a vet student on her way to the same place and we shared the cab. She was even going to intern at Wildbase in a few months--small world!

Being in San Antonio was something else, too. For a small town girl, it was like complete sensory overload. There was more stuff within a thousand feet of my hotel than there is in like my entire home town. I mean, there was an IMAX attached to my hotel, for crying out loud. There was also a spy exhibit, with lots of history about intelligence operatives, neat artifacts (like an enigma machine), and simulations of stuff like a laser maze or a room with a bunch of hidden cameras. If I wasn't so busy with the conference, I could have spent hours sightseeing or shopping (apart from the slight detail that Texas in August is like the surface of the sun, and I couldn't go outside for two seconds without melting). I simply had to take the boat tour down the river, which was amazingly gorgeous, but my poor old camera wasn't up to the challenge so I couldn't get a lot of worthwhile pictures.

Pigeon carrying spy cameras.

 

 

 Laser maze! I failed horribly.

A neat thing about the conference was how... sciencey everything was. There was a giant room set up with booths for vendors, including lots of free stuff (candy, free samples, stuffed animals), and tons of handouts. When trying to sell to vets, I guess, the thing to do is print out journal articles that support your product, and talk about all the studies and science that prove why I should by it. I also go try to some fun demos, like cutting a piece of meat with a radio-scalpel.

My favourite part was the keynote speaker, who is avet for NASA and has been in space a whole bunch of times. He had videos and photos of him actually in space and on the ISS. Most of his talk was about the physiological side effects of space travel, and the history of animals and space travel. Normally, my love of sci-fi is a completely separate part of my life to the work part, so this totally blew my mind. Completely starstruck. And it turns out, in a room full of hundreds of vets, there's really quite a high percent of sci-fi nerds!

The other exciting thing that happened was zoo day at the San Antonio zoo. Because in my profession, a professional conference can include zoo day.

 

 Left: Reptile house. Right: Feed prep area.