John: Hey bird friends it is time for Avian First Aid Episode 8. This Episode is also about bleeding your bird's toes and legs.
Dr. Pam Gordy: Toes and legs would be the second site that we will commonly see bleeding from and that usually happens when one bird is landed on another bird's cage and bird inside the cage doesn't like the intruder and it reaches out and it bites the foot or toe of the offending bird. It is usually as far as the settlement very, very easy, there is usually blood on the perch you may even be able to see the lesion without picking the bird up. If the bleeding has stopped then your assessment is how much blood is been lost and do I think my bird is in danger from blood loss. That is your initial assessment.
If you think it's in danger from blood loss then you probably going and want to do hospital cage, supplemental eating and you may even want to do a little bit of that before you decide to pick up your bird and bandage. When the cot is on, the foot of the leg usually bones aren't involved. If your bird is still perching on it then likely you don't have a fracture but if you se a bone for tendon protruding then probably you want to just stabilize your bird and get it to the veterinarian to get further attention.
If it doesn't have those things, then you want to make sure that your bird is stable enough to be handled and you do that by assessing its fat and how much blood is lost. Once you determine that it is stable enough to be handled you would catch him in a towel and you want to clean the blood off usually what happens is you can't really tell what part of the foot is affected because they walk in and there is blood all over and you don't know where the cut is or how many or how deep. So what you need to do is clean it up first and what I will often to do is just run a tap really slowly and just pull the foot right onto it, because if you scrub on an area then if they have a blood clot there and it has stopped and you just scrub the clot it gets bleeding again.
Whereas if you just let the water run over, it takes longer but then you can see where the cut is, how extent to the damage is etcetera. If it's still bleeding a little bit and you pour water. The cold water will make the blood clot more quickly, if not you can use the worm, but that is more comfortable for the bird. So now you have got your bird you have cleaned it up, you can access, a laceration on some part of the foot you don't think it is bad enough that it needs to go anywhere. I usually recommend bandaging them because they do tend to chew at broken nails or cuts on toes, and because they are on their feet all day they tend to get contaminated and feet material and get potential infection.
So once I have cleaned it up and I see what it is I will have some of my antiseptic either I usually rinse it with that first then dry it with gauze and then wrap the offending area. If it is just the toe you can put a bandage just around the toe because this part is better than this part and the bird will grab the end of it and have it off in about two second which you just took half an hour to put on. So what you need to do is wrap it around the toe and then up around the ankle and it ends up being kind of a ball. It is usually a good idea to stop the bottom of the foot with a gauze or a cotton and then wrap the toes around it and the reason is if the injury in addition to causing bleeding has caused any damage to the tendon then when the tendon heals if it heals far down to the bone then you don't have use of this toe anymore.
It is not going to open clot so you want it healed in the open condition that would sit on a perch, not in this position because there are many purges, it is going to sit on the knuckle and that part of the foot is not designed to take pressure. So just in case you get tendon tie down later you want to bandage it in perch position, so that if when you take that bandage off you will have to do everything that tendons aren't sliding well, then at least make him set on the perch and that toe isn't being stuck underneath and causing problem.
Obviously if you think the leg is fractured you may want to stabilize the private transport. Most birds are pretty quite and if they are not in a position where they have to try to get their balance in the way they are, they are fine with that.
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