John: Hello there friends! It's time for Avian First Aid, Episode 7.
I was leaving for work the other day and I dropped my hat inside the aviary and I forgot about it. So Tika, decided he was going to dissect it for me. You can see how he literally takes it apart, scene by scene, strips it down to its parts, and then starts to chew up the parts. He's playing down here on the couch, pieces.
Parrot: Hi!
This episode we are going to start covering common injuries and specific emergencies. The most common injury would be bleeding and the most common site for bleeding would be a blood feather.
Dr. Pam Gordy: So the next section is, I was going to go over some common emergencies and I am just going to do each one with three things. First of all, cutter effects to recognize it, then what actions to take, and then what could have been done possibly to prevent it from happening. The most commonly, probably skin emergency is bleeding, and the most common site that we would have bleeding from is a blood feather. I am going to go what a blood feather is for the people who don't know. When a bird moults, their old feather falls out and new one comes in, and when it first comes in, it looks like porcupine quill because it has to have a shaft for the soft feather stuff to come through the skin.
Once it comes through the skin, it sits there as a porcupine quill for anywhere from five to seven days, that new shafts starts to break off and the feather starts to open. For that feather, due to received nutrition, it has to have a blood flow down the shaft of that feather to make it grow. Once a feather is matured, that blood recedes and you have a hollower shaft of the feather, which is why you could use feathers in the old days to hold ink and write as a pen.
The downside of that is that during the time this is happening, the blood is flowing through a conduit that stays open. In a regular blood vessel, if you cut your blood vessel the blood pressure drops and because it's soft tissue, it collapses, which aids in having the blood clot and the area is small. If you cut a blood feather, that shaft of the feather stays open. It doesn't collapse, and that's why blood feathers can be dangerous, because they tend to be poor at clotting because it's such a large opening.
So, you get a clot on the end, the bird will move and the clot will fall off and it will bleed again. Now, all the feathers on the body are formed from blood feathers but when we say not blood feathers, what we classically mean is the large feathers of the wing and tail. The other ones can be damaged but they're usually not large enough to cause any significant bleeding. So, when we say that we have a bleeding blood feather, we usually mean that it's one of the large feathers. But don't think that a blood feather gives an abnormal structure. It's a normal structure and what we're aiming to do with blood feathers is have them mature into normal feathers so there isn't blood in shaft anymore, because then they will sit there for six months and get nice little feather.
So when they are coming in, the shaft is also not quite as big and tough as when the feather gets old. So it's more prone to injuries. The type of injury you get could vary from just a little split, that is vertical to broken right off. If it is a vertical split, most of the time what we try and do, is we try and save that feather. And the reason is that if you pulled a feather out, then you'll get another blood feather drawing in and you are starting the process all over again. So what we are aiming to do, A) Stop the bleeding, but B) care there not be a blood feather there anymore, which will happen in a couple of weeks, if you can maintain this one. So if it's a vertical split along the shaft of the feather, usually you can clean the blood off and just seal the split in the shaft with surgical glue or even KRAZY GLUE. It's not sterile, so you can do, if there's a little split put it together, take the blood off, seal it, let it dry and I usually do three applications. I let it dry and do one more, I let it dry, I do one more.
Try not to stick all the feathers at yourself to the bird, which usually means you need to hold. And surgical glue and the Krazy Glue does not work well when its wet. So you do have to slough the blood off first, hence your gauze that you have in your emergency kit here. So you can pick out your gauze and then you can fold your feather, hold the gauze on to get rid of the blood and then put your glue on. Once you get the first seal, you won't have to do that. But when it's actively bleeding, surgical glue does not stick, if it's wet. So you have to have it dry first. So you can seal those and usually if you seal them up, and the feather can continue growing and we can get a nice pattern.
Say, it's not a vertical split, say, it's right across rest of the feather is gone and this little piece like this if it keeps bleeding. It's because the conduit is holding it over, it's going to be hard to stop. So what you have to do is remove that shaft of the feather and the way you do that is you take your forceps, these are curved. So you take a pair of forceps these are my favorite ones and here's your feather shaft sticking out. Grab it along the length of it because then can you can get more purchase on it. Then, when you go to pull it, your forceps are less likely to slip off and you are less likely to break it.
If you grab it this way, you are probably going to snap it off and then you'll be starting shorter ones to keep pulling them. And as you are pulling it, what you are going to do is you want to hold the skin right where the feather comes out of it, because if you pull this and you are not supporting that skin, the skin will follow along, its quite delicate, you might get the feather out and rip the skin. So what I am doing is holding the skin, and my forceps are holding the feather and closely as you can get to the skin without pinching it it's the best. If you hold it on the end then the bird wiggles, then you might break it off. So if you can get it close to the skin as much surface area of the feathers, you can in your forceps, clamp down and then pull straight out.
After you've done that, you now have the feather all out, which is soft tissuing part of the vein, but it now can collapse, because you removed that from that. Hang on, hold it, because you want pressure to stop the bleeding. It's still bleeding inside there. So hold it for one minute. And I time it and its always seems like it must have been a minute already, and its probably only like 20 seconds.
Then let it go and watch it. Most of the time, if you cut the feather and you hold it for one minute, you're done, that's all you need to do. If it's still bleeding, hold again for another minute. Keep doing that for five times. If in five times, it does not stop, then you are going to need to do something else. I had my cloth coming once we were take blood feathers out, and what we ended up doing with him is we held follicle shaft and we actually sealed the follicle, but we used surgical glue because it had the sterile inside the follicle.
That will be the thing of choice to do, as opposed to clotter because surgical glue as the follicle expoliate it will just fall out and in a couple of weeks, it will be gone and it won't damage the follicle. If you try to use like clotter like a hot damp clotter and you burn the follicle and then you burn that site where the new feather is going to grow from and you may get an abnormal feather, no feather at all and feather that grows crooked, because you damaged the way it grows. But the ideal thing is you can tangle it to stop bleeding and to seal it surgical glue. And that works quite well.
Speaker: So, the next most common injury would be toes and lungs. We'll cover that next time on AVM First Aid, because I'll have to go to buy a new hat. See you.
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