🩺 Health & Disease · 7 min
The daily health check
Why this matters
Nearly every disease in this unit is survivable if caught in the first days and fatal if caught late. The check that catches it takes two minutes.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to
- Interpret a raptor's mutes and castings
- List the behavioural signs of a healthy bird
- State when a finding stops being your problem and becomes a veterinarian's
What you look at, every day
The weight, the mutes, the castings, the mouth, the feet, and the bird's demeanour. The manual's answer to "a good way to judge a raptor's condition and health" is all of them together.
Mutes
A mute is the combined excrement of the digestive tract and the kidneys. The urates from the kidneys are the white chalky part; the faecal component is the dark centre.
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Creamy-white with a small black centre | The ideal. A healthy raptor. |
| Small and greenish, bird otherwise well | An empty gastro-intestinal tract. Green means incomplete use of bile. With food in the crop and gut, mutes are frequent and large; as the tract empties they get fewer and smaller. |
| Green, bird not well | Can indicate illness, including liver problems and starvation. Read it with the rest of the picture. |
| Flecks of red, later watery and black | Coccidiosis. See the parasites lesson. |
The cloaca is the internal chamber where the excretory, digestive and reproductive tracts meet; the vent is its external opening. Keeping the vent clean and unobstructed matters.
Castings
A casting or pellet is the indigestible fur, feather and bone from the last meal, compacted and disgorged through the mouth, usually before the bird is fed again. Under the perch in the morning it is normal: grey, rounded at one end, tapered at the other, mucus-covered. It is not a bowel movement, not a sign of frounce, and not an infection. Examine it: what it contains and whether it comes at all are both information.
The bird itself
A bird that feaks after eating, warbles on the perch and stands on one leg is a content, healthy bird. Those three together are a good report.
The opposite report is gradual weight loss, poor appetite and lethargy with normal mutes and a normal mouth and feet. That combination could be several things at once, which is precisely why the manual's answer is "any of the above" and why it belongs to a vet.
Find the veterinarian first
The exam poses a bird with a broken leg in a town with no raptor-experienced vet, and asks how to prevent that scenario. The answer is to locate a raptor veterinarian before you obtain a bird. Not when something goes wrong. Avian medicine is a specialism, and the nearest practice may be two hours away.
This lesson is part of the NY Falconry Exam course. Open it in the course to answer the retrieval checks that go with it, track what you have read, and quiz the whole unit. Lessons, quizzes and the glossary are free.