John: Hi there! John here. Welcome to Avian First Aid Episode 3. It's the end of January 2008 here in Edmonton, Alberta. It's the dead of winter around here. This morning when we woke up, it was -39 degree Celsius. It's a balmy -32 degrees out now. It's been about three months since the birds have been able to go outside and they are starting to go a little bit crazy inside. I think we all are, it's time for a spring.
In this episode we are going to cover assessing the situation, so your bird is hurt and it's time to find out what happened and jus how bad he is hurt.
Episode 3: Assessing the Situation
Dr. Pam Gordy: So, once you are prepared for emergency to happen. Now, it happened. What do you do? First thing you need to do is you need to assess the situation and decide what do you think the potential causes are? How serious it is? If you can handle it at home or if you need to put the bird into a veterinary facility? So what I normally would do - and this always happens when your first get up and first get home to work and you are leaving suppose to -- somebody have tickets to any camp. So look at the situation and see if the bird is standing? Is it recumbent? What organ system seems to be affected? Is it respiratory? Is it breathing? Is it an injury? Is it bleeding? Is it just laying there and you don't know what's going on, but try and assess what system you think you are dealing with, because that that will help to decide what you are going to need to do.
With the breathing if you can smell any sort of toxin, the neighbor has decided to paint and the things are coming into your apartment. The first thing you want to do is get the ventilation improved so if there is an area where the ventilation is better, we will prefer to that area, if it's summer and you can open a window. You want to do that often if it is from an inhaled toxin that has damaged the rest of the body just getting that ventilated within 10 or 15 minutes, they can be very back to normal. You may still want to have it assessed because of some toxins can do damage to liver and such later, than at least you prevent to immediate problems and if you did decide to transport the bird, you have made the bird healthier so that during the transport, it's less likely to distress the stress and have some problem.
Low blood sugar that -- I am using that as an example. It isn't that you can say, what you referred as a blood sugar, but what often happens as if they have been struggling say - their foot is caught in a toy or their beak is caught on something or they have been straining too long to push, what can happen is they can lose out their body stores and they are not obviously feeding and therefore their blood sugar is getting low. Blood sugar to the body is like gassing into a car. If you don't have enough things start shutting down.
So, many times if the birds appear weak, or lonely, or unable to stand, it's handling to think that you can see from the situation the bird might have been caught restraining or doing something what was exerting itself for a long period of time.
In your emergency kit, you should have some type of sweetener and I would like to having corn syrup, because if the bird is no longer able to swallow, you can take corn syrup and you can smear it on the mucous membranes, upon the tongue and inside the mouth and they will absorb sugar through the mucous membranes without choking them or as you can try to give sugar solutions with the syringe and they are not swallowing, you can get it into lungs and they can choke on it, so if you have a little bit of that on hand, most people have it anyway that would work. They have been struggling and their blood sugar might be low, once you do not, don't handle it, leave them alone and it will take five to ten minutes to absorb through the mucous membranes to get in the circulatory system and often you'll see a bird that is standing there, hunched over, eyes are closed and if you give them a little bit sugar just like when you don't want to do to children at night, and it may get protocoled up -- and they may not get 100%, but it perks them up enough that you can then get the more and get through it to be assessed whether there has been any bleeding, or fractures, or breathing, or other things, whereas if you are too quick to move them and you are too much quick them try all of that initially, it might be just that little additional bit of stress that they don't make it because theor heart can't function.
Bleeding is a fairly obvious one to tell. One of things that you want to do when you assess bleeding is, if you can tell where it's come from? That's good, if you can tell it is still bleeding or if it's stopped, that's good and to roughly estimate how much blood loss there is, it's a good thing to do. Now that's very difficult to do when you see if it's smeared on the walls and all everywhere.
So, what you can do for find and tell me if it's coming up is you take some red Kool-Aid, put it in a syringe, so you know how much is in there and make a mass and then you have an idea of what does 5 mils look like? What does 10 mils look like? And it's kind of fun for kids to do that, but it is useful because then when I say how much blood has lost, instead of just saying I don't know what's all the cage? You can say, I think it's supposed as much or whatever and that's really useful to know because again that tells that helps to decide if you are doing food replacement, how much food you could give? How often, how lighter the bird is to be able to accept handling. They made us to do that in medical. It's going to be fun.
So that's your initial assessment. You kind of said, what system or organ system that am I dealing with? And how serious is it and do I need to do any kind of stabilization before we move the bird and kind of move on to the next step.
John: We've assessed the situation and we've tried to stabilize the bird as best we could, but the bird is sick or injured and needs to go to the vet. So the next step would be to transport the bird. We'll cover that on the next episode. Chou.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services