Birds

We treat and provide advice for a wide range of birds, from budgies to parrots and raptors to peacocks!

Birds are a relatively specialised area of veterinary medicine and most things happen quickly with them i.e. when they get sick, it often happens quickly. So owners will often need to act promptly.

As with most conditions affecting exotic pets, perhaps the majority of conditions result from inappropriate conditions in which they are kept. Many cage birds are flock animals in the wild, but we often choose to keep them in solitary confinement in a cage.

Many cage birds come from warm and humid environments (such as rainforests), but we keep them in very dry conditions.

Many cage birds come from sunny climates and as we all know, the UK is not the sunniest of places and if we then combine this keeping birds in a house with only limited access to sunlight, it is perhaps no wonder that many cage birds appear to develop problems.

Diets for cage birds can also be a problem. For some reason, in the UK we seem to think that if you have a parrot, you feed a parrot food that contains large proportions of sunflower seeds and peanuts. In their native countries, most parrots will never have evolved to eat such foods. Many parrots become fixated on sunflower seeds and peanuts which are nutritionally very limiting and can cause serious illness and even death over the longer term. Fortunately, there are a number of commercially available, nutritionally complete parrot mixes that address these issues, although converting a parrot that is already fixated to a seed based diet can be challenging.

If you need advice or have problems with one or more of your birds, then please book an appointment to discuss them. With birds, as with other species, prevention is still very much better than cure!