Abstract
Breakfast is not the simple matter it used to be. In December, 1985, it was a time to relax between feeding the animals and getting to work, a time to drink coffee and read a magazine like this one. Now breakfast is a contest between myself and Smidgen, a Timneh African grey parrot. Smidgen rampages across the table like a mechanical toy, tasting everything in sight, including my breakfast. I now keep my coffee cup in my lap or on the floor because, as I have told Smidgen, she is much too young for caffeine.
She is particularly fond of plain yogurt, perhaps because I eat it out of the same blue and white bowl I used for her baby formula. I generally win our get-the-breakfast contest but we are not as unevenly matched as you might think. While I can take large bites with the help of a spoon and Smidgen can only lap up little beakfuls, she cheats by trying to climb into the bowl. If she gets in, she wins. It is a Pyrrhic victory for her, however, since she is allowed to eat only a little bit of yogurt.
"A little bit of everything" is my guideline for Smidgen's good health, arrived at after paying close attention to many diets recommended by different people. Hatched September 12, 1985, Smidgen is a member of Sollie and Audio Feedback's ("Yoda: A Case of Calcium Deficiency;' Dec/Ian 1986) first truly successful clutch. She also represents my first venture into parrot breeding, since she was bred while Sollie and Audio were temporarily in my care.
Readers of the previous article may remember that Sollie and Audio are part of a cooperative breeding venture among three people and the two parrots. Despite unexpected and costly problems, the cooperative part has gone well because the three humans-Sue Ellis, Mark Snodgrass, and I-have adhered to the same goal: to breed healthy parrots. That may seem obvious but partnerships have foundered when the people are not absolutely clear about putting that one goal ahead of their own comfort, egos, and pocketbooks.
And did we open our pocketbooks!
Yoda, hatched from the first fertile clutch, had surgery on a leg fractured due to calcium deficiency. (Now the problem is getting him to stay put on his cage and take a break from talking once in a while.) The next clutch, hatched the week of June 24, 1985, produced two babies who lived for about ten weeks, only to die of failures of their immune systems, after many, many vet bills.
These two babies had to be removed from the nest at two weeks of age because Sue and Mark were forced to move from their house. The parent birds and their cage came to me for-as I assured my husband during the next six months of morning and evening jungle concerts-c-just a couple of months'.' The babies were fed a diet based on several different cereals and baby foods, powdered milk, sunflower meal, papaya and vitamins. They were supplemented with Neocalglucon. Yoda had been given calcium but perhaps not early enough; it was not until this clutch that it "took'.'
However a different problem developed. A fecal culture showed signs of staph and strep infections, with a blood test showing low white count and low protein level. On July 18 a vet injected the babies with the antibiotic Geopen and prescribed Gentocin orally. After each feeding, their mouths were cleaned with cotton swabs dipped in a solution of Nolvasan and water. By July 29 the indications of staph and strep were gone but the babies had developed E. coli. The Gentocin was continued orally. By August 12 all infections were cleared up. Although the protein levels were never high despite the good diet, the babies showed no other clinical signs of problems and one came to me at eight weeks of age.
This was to be my pet bird in exchange for ownership of Audio, the male. Widget was the first bird I had hand fed. He was not an eager eater and we thought this was due to the changeover. On August 22, I saw a white spot like a blister on the upper left side of the bird's neck. Feeling a little foolish, a little "mother hennish;' I rushed Widget to my vet. Since the spot was not on the crop, Candida was ruled out. After an exam, the vet said it might just be a spot where a feather was pulled when I was cleaning Widget after feeding.
By August 28 Widget was throwing up and losing some feathers. Back to the vet. This time a close exam showed a skin infection extending up around the neck, hidden by feathers, and a blood test's elevated white count confirmed this. The vet kept Widget for a couple of days in order to give injections of Gentocin. Meanwhile, the nestmate in Sue and Mark's care died and was sent off to a lab for a necropsy.
When I brought Widget, his Moxycillin ( oral antibiotic), and his skin ointment home, we embarked on a nightmare I hope I never have to endure again. He was weak and wasted; he tried to huddle so close to the brooder lamp that he would have burned himself on the glass of his aquarium if I did not put a towel in the way; his "ee-ee" noises that had sounded cheerful now made me sick with anxiety. Round the clock I tried to feed him every two hours. That schedule is gruelling enough with healthy babies but this was far worse. Nearly everything that went down his throat immediately came back up. We tried a different antibiotic, Chloromycetin; we tried Paregoric to help keep the medicine down; I tried hourly feedings. Of course, I sterilized all equipment between uses. Widget's ability to keep food down seemed to get better for a couple of days but then got worse. During the night of Sept. 4 he retched even when his crop was empty. First thing next morning, it was back to the vet where he had a seizure and died that afternoon. I was grieved but not surprised.
Both babies died of what was essentially a diffuse bacterial infection. Their immune systems had shut down. Widget's red blood cell percentage had shown a drastic deterioration from 36 to 29 to 19. All we had were theories: the parents' being selective feeders weakened the babies from the beginning; early injections let in bacteria from contaminated instruments or through the skin puncture; too much antibiotic at too young an age caused the immune system to fail.
Meanwhile, ever since the adult pair had moved to my basement, I was feeding them every food ever proposed by any book or breeder, and more. In the morning, they got corn-beans-ricekibble with generous amounts of ground pellets mixed in (they would not eat plain pellets). A judicious balance of feeding schedule and hunger pangs soon had them eager to nearly clean the bowl. Later in the day I gave them small amounts of dry and freshly sprouted seeds, along with fruit, vegetables, and vitamins. Since it was summer and I have a garden, much of their fruit and all their vegetables were fresh-picked and unsprayed. Sometimes I gave them egg yolk from my free-ranging chickens and bits of plain chicken meat (not from my own chickens). My husband began to complain that the birds were eating better than he was.
Sollie was sitting on another clutch of four eggs. Terribly depressed, we humans did not look foward to their hatching. Fortunately, the birds took no heed of us and the first hatched Sept. 7, only a few days after Widget died. The other two came along on the 10th and 12th, with one dead in shell early in development. There they were, ugly and beautiful, terrifyingly fragile, exciting.
Mark came over at intervals to give the babies miniscule amounts of calcium and vitamins. Half-heartedly, I offered to do it but I did not look forward to fighting off a biting, roaring Sollie in order to get the babies out of the nest. She sounded like a lion and was just as lethal. Mark declined my help.
Nobody got injections this time. We did fecal cultures regularly and blood samples a couple of times from the largest baby, starting when he was a few weeks old. It takes the patience of Job and the steadiness of a brain surgeon to extract blood from one of those pinsized toenails.
Since the babies showed no signs of problems, we left them with the parents until the eldest was eight weeks old. We then removed them for Sue and Mark to hand feed on the same formula as before. The birds thrived-protein levels and weights were far above the previous dutch's at the same age-but we three humans were emotionally cautious. I did not bring Smidgen home from Karen and Mark's place until she was on a token morning and early evening feeding with a larger feeding right before bed.
When I put her in her new cage, she growled at the dog, cheeped at me, and settled in as if she had never been away. While being weaned from her formula, she seemed to eat constantly, interrupting her feeding only for naps and play. She had been the smallest and most docile member of the clutch but now began to catch up with the others, turning quantities of food into terrible Timneh. The docile baby grew into an active, feisty, strong-willed youngster.
I am trying to teach her some appropriate table manners, such as do sample what I offer and do not consider my fingers part of the food. She wants to taste and chew everything, so that I have to watch her carefully when she is out of her cage. When she tries to bite the wrong thing, I say, "No;' or simply try to turn her attention to one of her toys.
While I would love to take nearly full credit for her existence and say it is due to my careful feeding of her parents, there are too many variables to know that any one factor made the difference between life and death. Certainly the improved diet played a part. So did experience-both the birds' and ours.•