Hello dear friends.
Posting with a complicated quail situation - anyone with time and interest wanting to weigh in is most very welcome to do so. I'll break it up into chunks since it's a long read.
How it started (TL;DR thought quail was egg bound, but wasn't):
I posted in this forum a couple of weeks ago when I suspected our lil buddy (her name is Helpful Friend) was egg bound (see https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/quail-possibly-egg-bound-possibly-had-seizure.1448321/)
Well, she wasn't egg bound. No egg ever came out and she seemed to get better, though she seemed a bit off and I was concerned that she wasn't eating enough gamebird feed. Truth be told I was almost certainly feeding her too much suet (I had been sprinkling it around her hutch so she had something to scratch around in and find...she's very hyperactive). We had also been feeding her a lot of black flies, which was new, and we thought maybe she was just having trouble digesting them since we found a few big black spots in her poop. So we stopped feeding her the flies and hoped for the best.
Then she got sick again (TL;DR stopped eating, drinking, lost a lot of weight, have been dropper feeding & took to vet)
Exactly one week later, she totally tanked. Puffed up and would not eat or drink anything (except mealworms and a few cucumber bits, her favorite). I was pretty sure she wasn't going to make it through the night so I just tried to make her comfortable. To my surprise she stayed alive another couple of days, and so taking it as a sign that the quail really wanted to live, I started feeding her slurry through a dropper. The first day of this I also mixed up some CORID and gave that to her, thinking from her symptoms and poop that she might have had Coccidosis (maybe the flies brought it?) but I increasingly felt like that wasn't the right move. The next day i kept feeding her the slurry and switched to an electrolyte solution for water. Then the following day I kept up feeding her with the slurry and then just mixed in ACV with the water I was giving her.
This went on for a few more days. She continued to decline and became extremely thin, her breast bone is basically just covered now by the skin of her keel. We finally decided to take her to.a vet (we'd have taken her sooner if I had more faith in the vet's ability to do much with quail...I've brought quail to different vets on several occasions and have never had a fantastic experience. One vet had never seen a quail before, handed me a pamphlet about chickens, charged me $80 and referred me to the internet
others at a bird and wildlife hospital have given me advice that ended up killing one bird. so, suffice it to say, I wasn't too excited about the vet and didn't want to stress the poor thing out for nothing. but I thought maybe the vet could give us some pain meds that would help her be comfortable.
The vet, unsurprisingly, said that they had no idea what the problem was, but that they could feel a bunch of fluid buildup in her abdomen. They drained the fluid build up and sent us home with meloxicam. I hoped they'd tube feed her but they said they couldn't. When we brought her home she was exhausted and huddled in the corner and, like the last 5 nights, I said goodnight to her thinking it might be the last time.
How it's going (TL;DR The bird seemed much better today, but still not great)
Today I brought her into my office where we have a wood stove. I fired the stove up and put her out with some water, food, and cucumber to see what she'd do (we'd been putting all of these things near her the whole time). the first couple hours she stayed looking pretty miserable, but then suddenly she made what seemed like a fairly miraculous turn around. She's spent the whole day plodding around the room, drinking lots of ACV water from her little teacup, pecking at veggies and sesame seeds and just a tiiiiiiiny bit of pecking at her gamebird feed but not much. We'd had a space heater going next to her aviary this whole time, but something about the heat from the wood stove really seemed to do her good, plus the meloxicam and the fluid drainage I'm sure didn't hurt either.
However, the bird is still clearly far from out of the woods and is experiencing a lot of weird symptoms:
The bird's weird symptoms are:
-Only standing on one foot - I have checked her feet and legs multiple times for injuries, and have also taken her to the vet for this, nobody was able to find any reason why she would do this). She did once have a big cyst looking thing on her leg, which the vet cultured and said it just seemed like joint fluid.
-puffing up after eating - She will eat a little bit of something then back up, puff up, close her eyes and generally act like she is in a lot of pain. Once she poops--which she does regularly but seems to do so with effort--she will then eat a little bit again.). Poops before today were extremely watery, but that was to be expected from her 'hospice' diet. After pecking about eating real food today, her poops were normal, although bright green from all the cucumber and pea sprouts she's been eating.
-excessive grooming - this is something she has always been prone to, which I've attributed to her being under stimulated. She's currently a lone quail as her other hatchmates have unfortunately passed on, and we were never able to successfully introduce her to a companion. She's been living alone for about 6 months but remained pretty chipper - she lives in our house so she gets a lot of daily attention and stimulation from us. I started spreading the suet around her aviary so that she'd have something to do, and it seemed to really help with the feather loss, though maybe it messed up her diet and all of this is due to a nutritional deficiency). Or, perhaps, she's had an internal issue and the grooming is her trying to deal with it. She grooms all over but lately seems to be obsessed with her keel, so there ya go.
-loss of voice - she is normally the most talkative quail *ever* she literally never stops chirping, again, very unlike other quails I've had esp females. however, she has lost her voice in the last week. her chirps transformed into little hoots that sound more like bobwhites than cotornix, and today she's barely croaking out her normal inquisitive purring.
-still not eating very much
-stopping a lot and just standing/sitting all puffed up with eyes closed.
So....Thoughts? Advice? Any ideas about what might be going on and anything else I can try to do to help her/make her more comfortable, this girl is all ears.
Posting with a complicated quail situation - anyone with time and interest wanting to weigh in is most very welcome to do so. I'll break it up into chunks since it's a long read.
How it started (TL;DR thought quail was egg bound, but wasn't):
I posted in this forum a couple of weeks ago when I suspected our lil buddy (her name is Helpful Friend) was egg bound (see https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/quail-possibly-egg-bound-possibly-had-seizure.1448321/)
Well, she wasn't egg bound. No egg ever came out and she seemed to get better, though she seemed a bit off and I was concerned that she wasn't eating enough gamebird feed. Truth be told I was almost certainly feeding her too much suet (I had been sprinkling it around her hutch so she had something to scratch around in and find...she's very hyperactive). We had also been feeding her a lot of black flies, which was new, and we thought maybe she was just having trouble digesting them since we found a few big black spots in her poop. So we stopped feeding her the flies and hoped for the best.
Then she got sick again (TL;DR stopped eating, drinking, lost a lot of weight, have been dropper feeding & took to vet)
Exactly one week later, she totally tanked. Puffed up and would not eat or drink anything (except mealworms and a few cucumber bits, her favorite). I was pretty sure she wasn't going to make it through the night so I just tried to make her comfortable. To my surprise she stayed alive another couple of days, and so taking it as a sign that the quail really wanted to live, I started feeding her slurry through a dropper. The first day of this I also mixed up some CORID and gave that to her, thinking from her symptoms and poop that she might have had Coccidosis (maybe the flies brought it?) but I increasingly felt like that wasn't the right move. The next day i kept feeding her the slurry and switched to an electrolyte solution for water. Then the following day I kept up feeding her with the slurry and then just mixed in ACV with the water I was giving her.
This went on for a few more days. She continued to decline and became extremely thin, her breast bone is basically just covered now by the skin of her keel. We finally decided to take her to.a vet (we'd have taken her sooner if I had more faith in the vet's ability to do much with quail...I've brought quail to different vets on several occasions and have never had a fantastic experience. One vet had never seen a quail before, handed me a pamphlet about chickens, charged me $80 and referred me to the internet
others at a bird and wildlife hospital have given me advice that ended up killing one bird. so, suffice it to say, I wasn't too excited about the vet and didn't want to stress the poor thing out for nothing. but I thought maybe the vet could give us some pain meds that would help her be comfortable.The vet, unsurprisingly, said that they had no idea what the problem was, but that they could feel a bunch of fluid buildup in her abdomen. They drained the fluid build up and sent us home with meloxicam. I hoped they'd tube feed her but they said they couldn't. When we brought her home she was exhausted and huddled in the corner and, like the last 5 nights, I said goodnight to her thinking it might be the last time.
How it's going (TL;DR The bird seemed much better today, but still not great)
Today I brought her into my office where we have a wood stove. I fired the stove up and put her out with some water, food, and cucumber to see what she'd do (we'd been putting all of these things near her the whole time). the first couple hours she stayed looking pretty miserable, but then suddenly she made what seemed like a fairly miraculous turn around. She's spent the whole day plodding around the room, drinking lots of ACV water from her little teacup, pecking at veggies and sesame seeds and just a tiiiiiiiny bit of pecking at her gamebird feed but not much. We'd had a space heater going next to her aviary this whole time, but something about the heat from the wood stove really seemed to do her good, plus the meloxicam and the fluid drainage I'm sure didn't hurt either.
However, the bird is still clearly far from out of the woods and is experiencing a lot of weird symptoms:
The bird's weird symptoms are:
-Only standing on one foot - I have checked her feet and legs multiple times for injuries, and have also taken her to the vet for this, nobody was able to find any reason why she would do this). She did once have a big cyst looking thing on her leg, which the vet cultured and said it just seemed like joint fluid.
-puffing up after eating - She will eat a little bit of something then back up, puff up, close her eyes and generally act like she is in a lot of pain. Once she poops--which she does regularly but seems to do so with effort--she will then eat a little bit again.). Poops before today were extremely watery, but that was to be expected from her 'hospice' diet. After pecking about eating real food today, her poops were normal, although bright green from all the cucumber and pea sprouts she's been eating.
-excessive grooming - this is something she has always been prone to, which I've attributed to her being under stimulated. She's currently a lone quail as her other hatchmates have unfortunately passed on, and we were never able to successfully introduce her to a companion. She's been living alone for about 6 months but remained pretty chipper - she lives in our house so she gets a lot of daily attention and stimulation from us. I started spreading the suet around her aviary so that she'd have something to do, and it seemed to really help with the feather loss, though maybe it messed up her diet and all of this is due to a nutritional deficiency). Or, perhaps, she's had an internal issue and the grooming is her trying to deal with it. She grooms all over but lately seems to be obsessed with her keel, so there ya go.
-loss of voice - she is normally the most talkative quail *ever* she literally never stops chirping, again, very unlike other quails I've had esp females. however, she has lost her voice in the last week. her chirps transformed into little hoots that sound more like bobwhites than cotornix, and today she's barely croaking out her normal inquisitive purring.
-still not eating very much
-stopping a lot and just standing/sitting all puffed up with eyes closed.
So....Thoughts? Advice? Any ideas about what might be going on and anything else I can try to do to help her/make her more comfortable, this girl is all ears.
