Bird has broken/sprained/dislocated leg? What should I do?

Well, I didn't see a response, so was waiting. Just in case:

Repost:

Drawings:

http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/skeleton.html

Those can be tricky to find, sometimes, but essentially you're looking to make sure each bone segment is solid from end to end. A broken tarsometatarsus is easy to see, so you'd probably be more worried about a broken tibiotarsus that's up in the feathers or maybe too near the joint of the tibiotarsus to the tarsometatarsus and it's fooling you.

In any case, you can roll up a towel into a donut that the bird can settle into the middle of in such a way as to take any pressure off of the leg easily. Sometimes, you can bring them in the house and treat them like the Queen of Sheba with food and water right in front of them and they'll behave pretty well. About the only thing they'll stand up to do is poop and if you dutifully keep that cleaned up and then gently put them back down, they can learn to take it real easy and heal up just like that.

Otherwise, you sometimes have to clip the feathers of the leg closely with scissors and use masking tape to immobilize the leg as shown here:



...and it might come out looking like this:



The break on this bird was high enough on the tibiotarsus that I extended the tape up and over the back to help it immobilize it--otherwise, following the drawings above wouldn't have gone high enough to actually do the job. I clipped all the feathers short where the tape went, too.

Pidgey