translucent feather

[Owlet]

full disclosure, I don't know much about macaws. Is a transparent feather like this normal or could it be something else? I noticed it on one of the rescues at work today, Harlee the Catalina macaw. We know absolutely nothing about her background and she has no band so we can't even get an age estimate, she seems young though.

 

[Owlet]

I skimmed through that PDF and didnt see anything specifically mentioning fully translucent feathers like above. The only mention of translucency is small lines across the feather

Figure 3. Stress marks in the feather of a Blue and Gold
macaw (Ara ararauna). These translucent lines in the vane
of a feather are generally oriented perpendicular to the shaft
and may develop in a growing feather during a transient
period of stress or disease.

And if it was PBFD I think we would for sure know at this point because a lot of our in-store birds are heavily molting and growing feathers back normally including birds she was caged near. Not gonna rule it out of course but my thoughts are more along the lines of either a feather that just didn't develop correctly for some reason or maybe malnutrition? Calcium deficiencies? I can bring it up with my boss and see if she can bring Harlee in for a test.


edit: appears the post I was replying to was deleted so this post is gonna be somewhat out of context xD

 

[ParrotGenie]

I skimmed through that PDF and didnt see anything specifically mentioning fully translucent feathers like above. The only mention of translucency is small lines across the feather

Figure 3. Stress marks in the feather of a Blue and Gold
macaw (Ara ararauna). These translucent lines in the vane
of a feather are generally oriented perpendicular to the shaft
and may develop in a growing feather during a transient
period of stress or disease.

And if it was PBFD I think we would for sure know at this point because a lot of our in-store birds are heavily molting and growing feathers back normally including birds she was caged near. Not gonna rule it out of course but my thoughts are more along the lines of either a feather that just didn't develop correctly for some reason or maybe malnutrition? Calcium deficiencies? I can bring it up with my boss and see if she can bring Harlee in for a test.


edit: appears the post I was replying to was deleted so this post is gonna be somewhat out of context xD

I read it to not sure what it is to be honest? So deleted original post. Leaning towards malnutrition a deficiencies of some kind as well. Only way to know is to have tests ran?

Here the PDF

https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/308945/3.pdf