These two talks were given to the AFA Convention in Los Angeles, California in August 2000.

Quicklink to second talk:

Helping our sick birds get better

By Malcolm Green – The Birdcare Company – UK

There is nothing worse than the feeling of helplessness we feel when one of our birds gets sick. Many bird keepers place their sick birds into a hospital cage and hope for the best.  There is nothing wrong with hospital cages if used sensibly but there is a lot more we can do to give them the very best chance of getting better. 

To start we must understand what is happening to our bird when it gets ill or is injured.  The bird's number one priority is to fight the cause of its disease whether that is an infection, some sort of injury or organ malfunction.  So the body directs as many of its resources as possible to the site of the disease.  Whether it is delivering white cells to an infected area or raw materials to the site of a broken bone the key resource used in this process is blood.  Blood carries the nutrients and immune system cells and bio-chemicals to the affected area.  To facilitate this the body widens the blood vessels that serve the target area so that more blood can be delivered.  More blood is also required in organs like the heart, lymph nodes and any other parts of the body involved in fighting the cause of the disease.  This is why we so often see swelling and reddening of the injured area and feel swelling in glands.

For the bird, just like with ourselves, blood is a scarce resource.  If the blood vessels in one area are to be opened up, then blood vessels in another area must be restricted so that the volume of the whole circulatory system is not increased.  This is the body's normal stress response and it works in the same way if the bird is frightened.  Just as with fear the organ which normally has its blood supply restricted during illness is the gut.

The digestive organs need feeding just like every other organ in the body.  And it gets it nutrients from its blood supply.  So the reduction in blood supply caused by illness very often causes a reduction in gut function.  This means that normal digestive and absorption functions are often severely curtailed.  The result is that many birds actually die of starvation and/or dehydration.  Tackling these two problems is the first line of sick bird support.  How do we do this?

The key issue is to overcome the limitations of the compromised gut.  This means supplying foods that require little or no digestion and are readily absorbed (remember that the key to nutrition is getting nutrients into the bloodstream not into the gut).  This means that starches and fats and poor quality protein sources are generally of only limited benefit.

Energy

Have you noticed that most birds sit fluffed up when they are sick?  This is because they are trying to insulate themselves better as they are having trouble maintaining their body temperature.  The temperature problem is either caused by a lack of appetite or inadequate absorption of energy from a poorly functioning gut.  Since maintaining its body temperature is the bird's most pressing problem, energy is the most important nutrient.  Remember the gut is not doing a good job so we need a readily absorbable source of energy. 

Traditionally sick animal products use glucose.  There are two good features about glucose.  Firstly it will work quickly because it is very rapidly absorbed into the blood.  Sick birds given glucose will tighten their feathers and look more energetic.  Secondly glucose is cheap.

But there are two drawbacks to glucose (or any other simple sugar).  Firstly they cause osmotic diarrhoea which will lead to worsening of the dehydration.  Secondly simple sugars will only give a short term energy boost.  So a bird will need to be given glucose every hour or two all through the day and night.  How many birds have you known to die overnight?  In contrast "short chain glucose polymers" provide diarrhoea free, long term energy (over 12 hours) enabling only twice a day feeding to provide plenty of body warmth.

This is particularly important for sick birds being supported through their drinking water as most species only drink twice a day.  This is because wild birds are at their most vulnerable to predators when they are drinking at water holes.

Re-hydration

The second most important issue is dehydration.  A loss of water from the body through diarrhoea, or in the breath will rapidly lead to death.  This problem is easily addressed using electrolytes.  These simple, water soluble minerals enter the bloodstream and from there the suck water out of the gut and into the blood by osmosis. 

So cheap electrolyte products are usually a simple mixture of glucose and sodium chloride (salt).  As you might expect the better electrolyte products contain a broader range of minerals including potassium and magnesium as well as ingredients to speed up the absorption process.  A very few contain short chain glucose polymers for long lasting energy.  And these really are the very best. 

This combination of technologies makes the ideal first aid products for addition to drinking water of any sick birds.  They can also be fed directly to the beak or by crop tube.

Really sick birds

For birds that are still eating and drinking electrolyte products as described are often all they need to give them the boost they need.

Really sick birds may well have stopped eating completely or have very poor digestion.  Extra vitamins and protein in addition to energy and electrolytes will help these birds substantially.  In particular the protein helps them repair damaged tissue and stops them from burning their own body tissue to keep warm.  This is the major cause of weight loss in most sick animals.

So a well designed emergency food product will contain four key nutritional groups:

1. "short chain glucose polymers" for long lasting energy

2. electrolytes (and other important minerals such as calcium) for re-hydration and other key body functions

3. a comprehensive vitamin blend to provide health supporting vitamins like A, E and C and a complete package of B group vitamins for efficient energy management

4. a readily absorbed form of balanced protein to prevent the bird from burning up its own muscle tissue as a source of energy

5. herbal "prebiotic" ingredients to improve the gut environment, act against many germs and stimulate the immune system.

Most sick birds are ill because they have been inappropriately fed over many years.  Appropriate treatment will depend on whether they are suffering from chronic (long term) nutritional problems, acute nutritional problems, infection or organ failure.  In nearly all cases provision of appropriately designed nutritional products will dramatically increase their chances of survival.  Understanding these basic principles and keeping stocks of appropriate products in the cupboard will help save the lives of so many birds.

Cage and Aviary Bird Nutrition Past, Present and Future

By Malcolm Green – The Birdcare Company – UK

Like so many other modern hobbies the keeping of cage birds boomed just over 100 years ago.  The birds that were domesticated then were dryland birds (budgies, canaries, zebra finches, cockatoos) adapted to annual periods of dry weather and the associated poor quality feed.  Although these birds survive and even breed on seed and water diets they do much better on improved nutrition.  The patterns of nutrition set back then have been followed since by millions of aviculturists.

These early bird keepers supplemented their diets with seeding grasses, weeds and more recently cuttlefish bone, grit, cod liver oil and the like.  The birds did better than they had on seed and water!  Many of today's bird keepers follow these traditions still.  By using seasonal green foods these people were automatically following the natural breeding cycle of many birds.  Unfortunately the pressures of modern life mean that most bird keepers can no longer provide their birds with the natural green foods their fathers used to use.

If dryland birds experience big changes in their seasonal nutrition birds from more stable environments like tropical rain forest (conures, macaws) require more consistently good quality diets.  These birds only flourished in captivity on seed diets if they were much more highly supported with fresh fruits and vegetables.

The nutritional value of all captive birds' diets depends critically on the nutritional value of the soil in which the plant foods were grown.  If an apple is grown in selenium deficient soil then the bird eating that fruit may well be selenium deficient too.  Could this explain why two breeders feeding and housing their birds in apparently identical conditions can get totally different breeding results?

These problems led to the development of more nutritionally complete diets with the introduction of supplements and pellets between ten and twenty years ago.  Initially these supplements ensured that at least minimum levels of vitamins were present in the diets.  Supplements improved and included minerals and more latterly limiting amino acids, more effective protein sources and herbal extracts.

The development of supplements is becoming more and more sophisticated and, interestingly, more and more natural.  Two trends are appearing from firms at the cutting edge of this technology. 

Firstly, rather than supplements ensuring that minimum standards of nutrition are met, they are being designed to enable breeders to manage the birds' natural nutritional cycles.  This enables breeders to more closely mimic seasonal changes in wild bird diets.  Interestingly it can also give the birds themselves more control over their food intake.

Secondly, product developers are going away from un-natural synthetic and inorganic ingredients to more natural organic products that greatly enhance bio-availability.  These trends are being facilitated by the huge range of "functional" ingredients being developed by the food industry with Japan and Europe in the forefront of these new technologies.

Natural nutritional cycles

Let us start by considering the nutritional cycles of wild birds and how this influences our captive bird diets.

It is easiest to think about birds from dryland areas first.  Examples are budgies, many finches and most of the African and Australian parrots and cockatoos. They live in regions of the world where there are no summers and winters just dry seasons and wet seasons.

In the dry season plants go into a semi dormant stage.  Their quality as a bird food is poor.  Birds don't breed in the dry season!  We should of course note that it is dry seeds and grains that form the basis of our captive bird diets so, without supplementation, these foods provide poor quality diets for our birds.

When the rains come, and plants grow again, the nutritional value increases dramatically as the plant needs more protein, vitamins and minerals for its own needs.  This gives a key message to birds that the food is now good enough to rear chicks.  This nutritional message is the key stimulus to bring these birds into breeding condition.  So we have designed nutritional systems that mimic this natural change in food quality.

Tropical forest birds respond exactly the same way though the changes in their natural diets are slightly more subtle.  However we can use the same techniques to stimulate birds like amazons, conures and macaws.

Birds from temperate climates respond to day length changes as well as nutrition.  Temperate birds only have short summers in which to breed so they use the increase in day length to predict the improvement in food quality later in the year.  Using day length changes (either natural or artificial) in conjunction with nutritional changes will bring the best results.  However high protein nutrition will work very well on its own.  We have customers who have bred canaries in outdoor flights in the middle of a British winter with no heat or light – just a high protein diet!

What we try to do is give control over nutrition both to the bird keeper and to the birds themselves.  This may sound strange but let me explain how many British bird keepers now supplement their birds during the year.

The diets I am going to describe are based on seed and eggfood for dryland birds and seed with fruit and vegetables for forest dwelling species. 

Let us start with non breeding birds.  The seed mixture provides the birds with a ready source of energy but insufficient vitamins and minerals for optimum health.  Often they lack enough quality protein too.  So we supplement these birds (preferably in the soft food or fruit) with a comprehensive vitamin, mineral and amino acid supplement every day.  This discussion is not the place for a detailed discussion of the role of these nutrients though it is worth noting that the amino acids (if given in sufficient quantities) improve the protein quality dramatically.  This reduces the amount of food the birds need to eat (saving you money) and so prevents any risk of obesity.  The health and fertility benefits of this can be significant.

An explanation of how limiting amino acids can dramatically change the useable protein level of the diet is worth while here:

Imagine that protein is made of just three different amino acids (it is much easier than thinking about 22!).  Let's call them A, B and C.  Plant proteins contain less limiting amino acids [C] than bird proteins (see below).

Two plant proteins  AABBCAABBC AABBCAABBC

Two bird proteins  AABBCCAABBCC AABBCCAABBCC

When the bird eats the two plant proteins it digests them (splits them into their individual amino acids). 

A A A A A A A A B B B B B B B B C C C C

The blood transports the amino acids to a part of the body where new protein is reassembled. But there are not enough Cs to make two bird proteins so many of the amino acids cannot be used!

AABBCCAABBCC  A A A A B B B B

It is easy to see how adding a few extra "Cs" (in a supplement) enables the bird to utilise all the protein it has eaten instead of wasting 40% of it!

By using a concentrated liquid calcium supplement with very high bio-availability we only need to supply extra calcium once or twice a week to non-breeding birds.  This is enough to ensure that bone calcium levels are topped up and that the bones are exercised in their important role of controlling blood calcium levels.  The importance of this will become clear when we discuss the breeding birds.

Many breeders also give their non breeding birds a probiotic once or twice a week to help