One of our local breeders had a 2 year old male Eclectus “drop dead” overnight. Always distressing to loose a good bird especially when you have just set it up with a new mate.

The bird was in good body condition with no marks anywhere to suggest trauma – a bit strange to loose a big bird like an Eclectus so suddenly.

On post mortem the bird had some changes in the liver that indicated he was not as well as he appeared to the owner. His other organs looked fairly normal except that the crop was empty and there was little in the bowel.


Once the gut was examined it was pretty easy to see the cause of the death. There was a Teflon catheter sitting in the middle of the proventriculus. How on earth did a 2 year old Eclectus in an aviary end up with a catheter in it’s proventriculus?


It turns out that the bird was hand reared and the rearer had a feeding catheter go missing from the bird room at about the time the Eclectus was starting to move around and check out it’s world.

The catheter had been sitting in the bird’s crop for over 2 years and then for whatever reason it moved down into the proventriculus where it started to rub on the wall of the organ and cause severe disruption. Without further lab work it appears the bird succumbed to an infection started by this wayward catheter.

Gang Gang Hen with respiratory distress:

A mature Gang Gang hen was presented with open mouth breathing and weight loss. The owner was pretty sure she had Aspergillosis and asked if it was possible to treat.

Aspergillus is a fungus that gets in the airways of birds, particularly Gang gangs and starts to grow. It stops the bird from being able to absorb oxygen properly so they start to breathe heavily. Treatment is very difficult because getting the drugs to the site of infection is nearly impossible. In my experience most of these Aspergillus birds die despite our best efforts.

In this case we anaesthetised the bird and scoped her to have a look at the air sacs. Certainly the air sacs are pretty grotty with a lot of inflammation and patches of dried pus on the surface, but there was no evidence of Aspergillus. At this stage we are treating her with antibiotics both by injection and by nebulisation. The nebuliser is used to try and get drugs to the surface of the air sacs.

Gang Gang juvenile.

Another leg deformity. We see a lot of these and generally they are quite treatable. This was a young gang Gang male with an old fracture and turned foot.

The process is to anaesthetise the bird, open up the leg at the fracture site, refracture it and then to insert a pin to hold the leg in position. In this bird the bone was easily broken and a pin placed without incident. A simple bandage and back in the cage.

We will change the dressing a couple of days and then send him home.

The pin will be taken out in about 3 weeks.