Deborah Monks

Deborah Monks from Brisbane Bird and Exotics Veterinary Service will be regularly posting to this blog now. She’ll be giving us some insight into the interesting cases and controversies she sees in her line of work.

During a residency in England, she was privy to a particularly amazing operation on a five-year-old White Cockatoo named Poppy. She had been playing with a thumbtack around three hours prior to Deb meeting her, and her owners had feared she had swallowed it. The local veterinarian had taken x-rays and confirmed the thumbtack was inside Poppy.

Here Deb describes what their next move was:

‘We anaesthetised Poppy, placed a tube into her windpipe, and began the laborious process to try to retrieve the thumbtack. Frustratingly, we could see it with an endoscope (a camera telescope) placed through her mouth and into her stomach, but we couldn’t grab it with any of our forceps. After a long time trying, we had to go to abdominal surgery to retrieve the thumbtack. To get access to the proventriculus (first stomach), we had to cut through the abdomen and two ribs.
‘As often the case, Poppy stopped breathing during this procedure and needed manual breathing given to her by the nurse assisting the procedure. We then had to cut into her proventriculus, and reach into her ventriculus (gizzard) to retrieve the thumbtack.  Then, we had to close it all up again. It was quite a relief to finally have the offending item in hand when we had finished –the entire procedure had taken 2.5 hours!’
Poppy recovered very well. Deb writes that the case highlights just how inquisitive birds are and how much they can sometimes lack common sense.
‘In the past year I’ve seen birds rip holes in their skin getting caught on sharp points, break wings and legs getting caught in toys, swallow cotton fibres that cause blockages in the gut and even get garlic poisoning from bathing in a saucepan used for sauce the night before.
‘So, keep your birds safe and don’t trust them to recognize hazard when they see it – that’s your job!’ said Deb.
Deb’s next post will cover wing trimming.