Problems and Solutions

Smokey was a normal gray, male cockatiel. His head was a bright yellow, with startling orange patches over his ears. He was spunky , inquisitive, easy to work with and very friendly. He was my wife's favorite.

A few weeks ago one night, I noticed some very green and loose feces coming from Smokey. He also seemed a little quiet. Early the next morning, he was even more quiet and I decided to take him to the vet. While I was calling to make an appointment, Smokey shuddered and died in my wife hands.

The death of a favorite pet is always a shock, and always very sad. We invest so much time, effort and love into caring for and training and enjoying our pets that we lose a great deal when one dies. This was certainly true of Smokey. He had been born on July 5, 1992 of Chico and Groucho, parents we own. After being fed by his parents for 21 days, we put him and his sibling into a brooder and hand fed him for the next four weeks. He weaned without problems and became a complete delight to handle. A little more than 13 months later, he was dead.

Beyond the grief over Smokey's death, my first concern was to find the cause of death and if any of my other birds were in any danger. The first step was to arrange a necropsy, the animal equivalent of a human autopsy, to determine the exact cause of death. Books that I own pointed to psittacosis as a possible cause of death, based on that green stool. That could have been a big problem because Smokey was in contact with all of our other birds up to the day of his death and psittacosis is contagious. The good side was that none of my other birds exhibited the slightest symptom of illness.

After a few phone calls, it became clear that the most convenient place for the necropsy was the Animal Medical Center. If you don't know it, the AMC is a godsend to pet owners because it is open for emergencies 24 hours a day, every day. It's fees are reasonable, the expertise of its staff is nationally known.

I contacted Dr. Katherine Quisenberry, an avian specialist on the staff, and she had me bring Smokey down to the hospital.(By the way, it is important not to refrigerate or freeze the body before it is necropsied.) She arranged for a necropsy and pathological study to find the cause of death. This service costs $150, and you might say that this is a lot of money for a bird that can be replaced for less than that amount. But you have to consider the other birds in your collection (and we all have more than one bird, don't we?). Unless the cause of death is an accident, being killed by another pet, or an obvious poisoning, one has make the effort to determine the possibility of contagion from the dead bird.

It turned out that Smokey died of an acute bacterial infection, which spread to his heart, lungs and brain. The cause of this infection was most probably due to his having eaten some contaminated food. It is even possible that his death was my fault. Being lazy by nature, I sometimes left soft food in the cages of my birds over night. Some of this food might have spoiled and caused the infection. Or, it is possible that, inquisitive as he was, he picked up a food scrap from something that was about to be thrown out or from where it had dropped near the bottom of his cage.

Either way, there are two things I have learned from this episode:

1)always remove soft food after a few hours, whether eaten or not eaten, and

2)to be more careful about the cleanliness of the bottom of the seven cages now occupied in this menagerie.

The other thought I want to share with you is that it is very important to have a bird which dies without known cause necropsied to determine the cause of death. If it turns out to be something like Smokey's infection, contagion is not a problem. But if it is some contagious disease, you will know that you have to take steps, including the disinfection of the bird's` cage and every surface which it touched to avoid spreading the disease to your other pets.

I hope it a long time before any of you experience the death of a pet, bird or otherwise. But this type of event is inevitable, sooner or later, for all living things. It is important, as it is in the case of our human relatives, to be prepared. Working your way through the necessary steps is one way to assuage the immediate grief, and, in the case of pets, will help avoid more tragedies in the immediate future.