Five week old starling with possible PMV

[Kasia]

I found this board thanks to Terry Whatley on Starling Talk. I have 4 starlings, 7 zebra finches and one wood duck, all inside birds, the starlings and duck are not caged.

A few days ago I noticed that my youngest starling, Pom-Pom, has started tilting her head to the right. I didn't think anything of it at the beginning, but now it's gotten progressively worse. Yesterday it was so bad, she started turning in circles, holding her head completely up side down, flipping over onto her back, doing somersaults, falling off things, crash landing, walking backwards, not being able to drink properly (she tries to drink with her head up side down and I'm afraid she will drown). We took her to a local vet here in Mississippi (we live in New Orleans, but were displaced thanks to the hurricane and our house is being rebuilt at the moment) and he put her on Baytril/Nystatin.

Terry suggested that she may have PMV, and I mentioned this to the vet here, but he didn't want to do a fecal on her. My avian vet in New Orleans is Dr. Rich. He has been my vet for 2 years now, but the hurricane also destroyed his office, so he practices at LSU 2 days a week and at another hospital in New Orleans.

I've done some reading up on PMV and from the symptoms it really does look like she may have PMV. I'm attaching pictures as well as a video of what she's acting like just so everyone can see. I also didn't know that she should be kept away from my other birds, and they have all been together all over the house.

Last night I thought for sure she was dying. She fell off her tree that she sleeps in with my other starlings, so we decided to let her sleep in a little carrier cage on our bed. In the little cage, she fell over on her side, feet stuck straight out, and she didn't even make any attempt to right herself. I made a little nest with walls all around her with towels, so that she could sleep upright. This morning she is once again running around, eating good, playing and singing, and having these spells about 50% of the time. She IS able to hold her head upright and turn it left as well, but she has a very hard time. I was very pleasantly surprised she was still with us today. My husband stayed up all night watching her.

Now I have a few questions, just in case this IS PMV.

How could she have gotten it? She was only 2 weeks old when I got her. What is the incubation period? Since my other birds have been exposed, is there anything I can do to prevent them from showing symptoms in the next few weeks.

Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated. I love my avian vet and am planning on taking her to him sometime early next week. Is there a blood test that can determine if it is PMV? In the meantime, is there anything I should be doing to make Pom-Pom more comfortable?

You can view a short video I took of her yesterday here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXUBGnrCBak

Kasia

[Feefo]

It sounds like a form of encephalitis that affects juvenile starlings and sparrows, I don't know if the cause has been established but it is not PMV:

http://www.sac.ac.uk/consultancy/vet.../may/wildbirds


Cynthia

[Kasia]

Wow. So the mystery deepens. Is this almost always fatal? They really don't list too much information about it. Is there a cure? Any medication I should be giving her?

[Feefo]

These cases were in Scotland, so it might not be the same cause, but I doubt that it is coincidental bearing in mind Pom-Pom's age and his isolation.

As for being fatal, so often sick birds are euthanased just because they cannot be returned to the wild, I ignore statistics on mortality and hope for the best.

That report was a year ago, I will try to research a bit more see if anything new is known.

I think that there are also other forms of encephalitis in starlings in the US, some may have a successful form of treatment.

Cynthia

[Feefo]

It sounds as if it could be bacterial, and the bacterium is found in the US, so an antibiotic might be appropriate in this case.

I have copied this from a budgie site: (http://www.derek-t-dobson.com/newsflash.htm


A TINY bug never before found in Europe has emerged as the chief suspect in the mysterious deaths of thousands of garden birds across Scotland.
Scientists say the minute bacterium - one of the smallest and simplest organisms yet discovered - could even account for the disappearance of half of the UK’s house sparrows.
Vets and bird experts have been baffled by a "mad bird disease" which afflicts young sparrows and starlings in the west of Scotland.
Victims of the brain inflammation cannot fly and instead walk around in circles, do somersaults and twist their necks into bizarre poses. They then die.
But in a joint investigation, Tom Pennycott of the Scottish Agricultural College, and microbiologists at Liverpool University’s veterinary school, have found that the brains of a number of victims were infected by a species of bacterium called Mycoplasma sturni.
The bug, simpler than other bacteria, has only previously been found in the US, where a similar species has been blamed for a fatal disease in finches.
Further research is now under way to establish if Mycoplasma sturni is responsible for the Scottish syndrome.
Pennycott had previously checked every micro-organism he could in a bid to find the culprit behind the disease, which has no official name despite being first noticed in 1994.
But he drew a blank until experts from Liverpool heard him give a talk on the subject.
They suggested he looked for mycoplasma species because they have been known to cause disease in poultry.
The bugs are only a few thousandths of a millimetre across and lack the cell walls which most bacteria have.
Liverpool’s vet school has one of only a handful of laboratories in Britain which can identify them. Pennycott took samples during post-mortems on starlings found with the symptoms, and sent them to the Liverpool team, which confirmed the presence of Mycoplasma sturni.
Pennycott, a senior veterinary investigator at the SAC’s centre in Auchincruive, Ayr, said: "We started investigating partly because we wanted to make sure this wasn’t a disease that could spread to humans or poultry flocks, and partly to make sure it wasn’t being caused by something we were doing which was impinging on the wild bird population, such as pollution.
"We looked at other suspects such as West Nile Virus, which can be caught by humans, but they weren’t present. Mycoplasma was eventually checked because of the connection with illness in poultry."
The task now is to establish how widespread the bug is in healthy birds, and if it causing the disease or is simply a harmless passenger.
If it is to blame, it could be one of the reasons for the house sparrow’s population crash. Numbers in the UK have fallen from about 12 million pairs in the 1970s to between six and seven million.
Sparrows have disappeared from many previous haunts in Scottish towns and cities, such as Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens.
Starlings have also declined, although less sharply, and in theory the bug could be implicated in their problems as well.
Although only found so far in the Glasgow and Ayrshire area, Pennycott believes it could be much more widespread.
He said it was "certainly one candidate" for the house sparrow’s problems, although other illnesses such as salmonella, and particularly changes in farming practice, had to be considered.


Cynthia

[Kasia]

It seems like Pom-Pom is perfectly fine right after she wakes up from a nap. She holds her head up straight. I'm at a total loss, knowing that there really isn't much more I can do.

Thanks for shedding some light on the topic though. I'm desperate to find out what's causing this and how to stop it.

[TAWhatley]

Hi Kasia and welcome to Pigeon-Talk. Though I'm very sad the Pom-Pom is having such a rough time of it, I'm glad you're here .. we have a number of members like Cynthia who have a lot of experience with PMV, salmonella, and some of the lesser known "bugs" that can wreak havoc with our birds.

Cynthia, thanks so much for your posts and the links .. scary stuff.

Terry