I'm so sorry for your loss.
Do you know there's an animalicious subforum here and when you need support following the loss of a pet, there's tremendous support. Just an FYI if you find it helpful.
http://forum.purseblog.com/animalicious-/
Thank you.
Yes, I've seen the subforum, but I guess I feel more "at home" here under Coach.
I'm sorry about your loss. We used to have a parakeet with similar coloring. Our cockatiel died from egg binding. She was fine one day and the next day she was gone. It's even more terrible when it happens on special days. We always seem to experience a loss on a holiday.
I'm trying to resist buying too many feathers. Twins on the blue. I'm seriously considering getting the orange. I could have sworn I saw pink on Coach.com but it isn't there now.
Thank you.
We too had a cockatiel die from reproductive issues too, but in our cockatiel's case it was egg yolk peritinitis. When hens get older, sometimes their reproductive systems go a little crazy. A bird that had never laid an egg, in the ten years that we had her, suddenly tried to lay an egg (though she was an elderly 17 or so when this happened, as she too was a rescue). In egg yolk peritinitis, a yolk comes out of the ovaries, but misses the "cup" where it's supposed to gain the rest of the egg. Instead, it wanders down into the abdominal cavity, gets infected, and is very, very hard to recover from.
In Chrissy's case (this lovebird), she actually did have egg yolk peritinitis as well, and this time we actually *beat* the infection with early and often doses of antibiotics. In the bird world, that borders on a miracle. Problem was, she also had cysts (similar to what humans can get ... polycystic ovaries). I've had her at the vet once a week since the week after Memorial Day, where our vet was aspirating fluid to buy her time. We have one of the best avian vets in the midatlantic area, but there are some things you just can't win. Especially with the hens.
The irony is that when all this started, hubby and I kind of vented in frustration that we should avoid the females in the future. It was an utterly stupid thing to say, because most of our birds we got simply because they needed new homes. We would never turn a bird away just because she was a girl .... we were just venting. .... Well, lo and behold, because Chrissy was sick these last two months, we've been stopping in more often at the bird shoppe where Chrissy had first been "dumped" and we'd adopted her. I was stopping in weekly just to update them, and there, suddenly, one week, was the female blood-sister of two of our other parrots. She was being boarded while her owner was on vacation, and holy hell did she look bad. She was being neglected, ignored, cage-bound (scared to come out of her own cage), and had started plucking out her feathers as a neurotic reaction. Her wings and her behind are half bald. We brazenly made an offer to her owner (still can't believe I did it -- I'm not usually that forward, but we just felt desperate to get her out of that home). I played up the aspect that she was sister to two of our parrots, and lo and behold, we *got* her. So in between running Chrissy back and forth to the vet, I''ve also been rehabbing this totally new bird. .... And the irony is, it's a girl ... right after hubby and I had done our ridiculous venting about hens and reproductive issues. And of *course* we love her to death. (Rolling eyes at myself. And sorry for the ramble.)
(And yeah, the SA said she thought there was supposed to be a light pink feather coming too. I don't have any pink birds
, but if it's the blush color, I'll be all over it.)
I'm so sorry for your loss. What a beautiful bird; she's such a pretty blue.
The Kristin is beautiful too. The feather fobs are perfect for it!
Thank you. She was a Dutch Blue mutation .... which made her very pretty, but unfortunately, in the process of breeding for mutations, you also inadvertently breed for females that lay a lot of eggs .... cue the future egg problems.
