AlexK
New member
First of all, I haven't personally seen this problem, but rather it was asked to me by a customer at my workplace and I had never heard of it.
I work in a petstore, and i'm pretty much the only person there with any kind of extensive bird experience. The other day I had a customer ask me a very peculiar question. She claimed that she had previously had 2 budgies which had been fine for several months, she had been feeding them zupreem pellets with daily fresh fruits and occasionally (once weekly) seeds, as well as millet a few times a week. She had not noticed any smelly or runny mutes, odd behavior, lethargy, etc. One day when she came home from work both birds were very "swollen" looking, as she put it, and about 20 minutes later both of them were on the bottom of the cage dead.
I asked her to elaborate on the swollen comment and she said that they just looked very fat all over, and if you looked closely you could see the skin in a few places between the feathers. I asked if she had fed them any out of the ordinary food such as avacado or chocolate and she said she hadn't. I also asked about any non-stick cookware as well as any gases or fumes and to her knowledge there weren't any.
What could this be? I've been doing part time work in a bird of prey rehab for about 2 years, and have been fostering parrots for almost a year, yet i've never heard of a disease making something look swollen outside of bumblefoot and that's not what she described, although I admit my knowledge of fid disease is not very extensive.
I work in a petstore, and i'm pretty much the only person there with any kind of extensive bird experience. The other day I had a customer ask me a very peculiar question. She claimed that she had previously had 2 budgies which had been fine for several months, she had been feeding them zupreem pellets with daily fresh fruits and occasionally (once weekly) seeds, as well as millet a few times a week. She had not noticed any smelly or runny mutes, odd behavior, lethargy, etc. One day when she came home from work both birds were very "swollen" looking, as she put it, and about 20 minutes later both of them were on the bottom of the cage dead.
I asked her to elaborate on the swollen comment and she said that they just looked very fat all over, and if you looked closely you could see the skin in a few places between the feathers. I asked if she had fed them any out of the ordinary food such as avacado or chocolate and she said she hadn't. I also asked about any non-stick cookware as well as any gases or fumes and to her knowledge there weren't any.
What could this be? I've been doing part time work in a bird of prey rehab for about 2 years, and have been fostering parrots for almost a year, yet i've never heard of a disease making something look swollen outside of bumblefoot and that's not what she described, although I admit my knowledge of fid disease is not very extensive.