Cockatiel breaking Wing Feathers

[a11ycat]

Hi,
My newest cockatiel I got in January, he was probably 10-12 months old and already clipped... he was doing fine, lives in a big cage with my other cockatiel, they tolerate each other and stay out of each other's way... anyway, he has now lost all his long wing feathers, he had the long ones near the tips of his wings, and I think he had a couple of other ones in his main section, but I had to go away for 2 weeks, during which time he got left with my boyfriend who is good at caring for them but didn't spend much time with them. Anyway, when I got him back from this, he didn't have any long feathers at all, and my boyfriend said that there had been several long feathers at the bottom of the cage when he cleaned them out... he has had some feathers come through underneath, but he's managed to break 1 on each wing, and he doesn't seem to realise he can't fly as far as before, and keeps on crashing, and causing the broken feathers to rebleed... there were four emergencies, saturday night, sunday morning and sunday evening (one on each wing), and he's lost a few drops of blood each time which worries me... each time I managed to get some corn flour over the bleeding. I'm taking him to the general vets in an hour, to see if they can help me pull the blood feathers out, I know you can do it yourself, but its the first time for me, and I worry that if it bleeds alot, he may have already lost a bit of blood so I figure the vets is the best place for him to bleed if he's going to... anyway, does any one have any ideas what I can do to help him grow back his feathers without him breaking them?

[lin]

Good idea to take him to the vet, and make sure you get the vet to talk you through what to do. Once the feathers have been removed, you shouldn't get any more problems. Just make sure he has a good diet - that will reflect in the quality of his feathers.

[Angela]

How did it go at the vets?

[a11ycat]

It went fine, well the vet didn't really know what to do... but I'd read up in a book what should be done, so had a fair idea, and basically talked the vet through it... wasn't too impressed with the vet as she tried to see which feathers were bleeding by pulling the clots off them... and so she had to cauterise them (and I've now got some lovely cauterising stains on my hands).
Anyway, we managed to get the offending feathers out cleanly and I'm hoping that has solved the problem... though next time I'll probably just do it myself. I think I was being a bit too panicky about the blood thing, but an experienced breeder told me that birds can lose up to 30% of their blood without any ill effects showing, and there's no way the poor bird lost that much!
So end result is a bird that hopefully isn't going to bleed every time he attempts to fly and a vet who now knows how to remove blood feathers!!!

[lin]

MMM, don't you hate that with vets? still, at least you know how to do it now, although I hope you never need to do it!