My Mom Says I'm Cool...: Poor, poor Chauncy

A couple of weeks ago I was awoken at about 6:00 a.m. to the sound of birds thrashing in their cage. I sat still in bed, waiting to see if it would happen again. It did, only it didn't stop. I ran downstairs and threw on all the lights to see my lutino cockatiel Chauncy covered in blood and clinging to the side of his cage. Blood was splattered everywhere. You know that episode of Mad Men where the guy's foot gets run over by the John Deere mower? Yeah, it was kind of like that.

Cockatiels can't see in the dark, and they can get frightened by noises and sudden movements (even if they have a nightlight, as Chauncy does). Since birds' natural reaction when frightened is to fly away, they start thrashing around in their cage, and they can injure themselves pretty badly. This last night fright wasn't Chauncy's first, but it was certainly his worst. Seriously, there was blood everywhere. It was splattered on the walls and all over the cage, and even worse it was dripping from Chauncy's wing (where he had broken a blood feather) into a small pool on the bottom of the cage. I grabbed Chauncy and applied some paper towels to his wing to stop the bleeding. (There's actually a powder you can buy to stop bleeding but I don't have any of it. I obviously need to get some.) Once my shoddy first-aid was applied, Chauncy just sat on my finger and let me scratch his head. After a few minutes I put him back in the cage and went back to bed. The next morning I spent a good half hour scrubbing up the blood and disinfecting everything. I also took Chauncy into the shower and got all the blood cleaned off of him, too. I'm happy to say that he's much better now. But here are some gross pictures, just for entertainment value.