#hispaniolanamazon

Over the course of the last 5 months these are what I have found Tanya’s favorite foods to be.

Veggies:

1. Brocolli (raw only and just the stem. Sometimes she will shred the top but not eat it), Green peppers (she will eat occasionally but will always choose red before green), Red Peppers, Carrots (probably her number one), Cukes (just a bite or two), Squash (maybe a bite)...

Fruit (used sparingly):

Apples, Oranges, Grapes, Strawberries...

She will not eat:

Tanya came into foster care with me after she had been in the rescue for a week. She went straight into quarantine in a room away from my other birds. I kept her in quarantine for 30 days which is what should be done for all birds who enter a new home, even after the vet visit and lab work comes back.

Tanya’s vet visit was scheduled for a couple weeks after I brought her home but the vet had seen her briefly at the open house the rescue had held that month. Off the bat she had a plan for her. Tanya was to be converted to pellets with fresh chop and get some exercise daily. We converted her to Hagen’s Tropimix which was the pellet that the rescue uses for all their birds and then a low fat tropimix was added to the next food order. I immediately started off by feeding her chop in the morning which consisted primarily of vegetables with a piece of fruit to get her enticed. Since fruit has a higher amount of sugar in it, I used it sparingly. Tanya took to the pellets and the chop right away. She just loves to eat.

However, watching her made me nervous. When I pick her up she always flaps which is great exercise and exactly what we want. However, she would get so worn out by the littlest of things.  I could only pick her up for the bare minimum that I needed to in order to care for her which included taking her out of the cage to clean her bed, during which time I’d place her on a blanket where she would eat her chop and then picking her up from the blanket and walking to the bathroom to wash her bottom and walking back to the cage. She would get so worn out that she couldn’t even eat her chop without taking a few naps in between. Her little heart just couldn’t take anymore exercise than that. It was clear at this point that she has had absolutely no exercise in her previous home. 

Tanya was relinquished to Lazicki’s Bird House and Rescue in early June of 2015. As the rescue does for all relinquishes, we recorded a bit of information about her background. To start, she has been through multiple homes and her age is unknown but this last home had her for at least 20 years. However, she is assumed to be much older than 20. She is female, we known this because she was surgically sexed and has a tattoo on her wing to prove it, which naturally makes me wonder if she was at one point a breeder bird. 

The reason she was being relinquished was because the woman who had been taking care of Tanya had gone into the hospital and the kids inherited her. They relinquished her along with one or two other bird to the rescue. The big thing with this particular case was that the woman who inherited her knew she was not well and wasn’t sure what the right thing to do with her was. She was strongly debating euthanizing her but fortunately she decided to relinquish her to us instead so that we could make that call.

What was wrong with her? Well on the form she listed that her leg was broken and they could not tell us how the accident happened. Although it was really her foot, not her leg. What we discovered after examining her was that it was a lot more than just her foot. Tanya was covered with large lumps all over her body from her abdomen to her wings, face, crop, you name it. She also was lethargic and had trouble moving around in her cage. She could not perch, she could not fly and she could not endure much exercise.

Her diet consisted of a seed mix (Higgins vita seed) with occasional fruit and veggies, peanuts and gram crackers, Ritz crackers and no pellets. Aside from the occasional fruit and veggies her diet was crap, to say the least. 

The woman who had her for 20 years never took her to the vet for annual or bi annual well visits which could have very well prevented her condition and the last known time she had seen a vet was 20 years ago for an “emergency procedure” which I can only assume was for her foot. The veterinary documentation is very vague.