upatsix.com - Your Source For Pet Bird Information

I have a male peachface lovebird who is about 13 years old. He has survived two companions, and up until yesterday morning still seemed healthy as a horse. Yesterday afternoon when I got him out to sit with me for awhile, he began one of the usual rituals of rubbing his beak on my five o'clock shadow. However.....the beak rubbing continued on for many minutes on my face, my shoulder, my hand....and he was drooling the whole time. His objective seemed to be to wipe the drool off his beak, but more kept coming.

My wife noticed that he seems to have lost weight. A friend of ours who breeds birds suggested he could have possibly eaten something toxic, or maybe picked up a yeast infection. He is never exposed to any birds outside of the cage next to his with two cockatiels and a parrotlet. There is no possibility of infection from other birds. I know we've lost lovebirds from some manner of organ failure as they grow older, and at 13 years.....I'm thinking he may just have reached the point where his body is starting to fail. The drooling stopped for awhile, but seems to resume after he eats. He is still pretty energetic, but I'm afraid that he may getting ready to go into a rapid decline.

Any ideas? We've not had good luck with avian vets. They usually charge a lot of money for visits and medication, and then the birds die anyway. If he's really dying, I'd rather spare him the trauma of dragging him off to strange places, and forcing medicine down his gullet.

Bacterial or yeast infections don't necessarily have to come from being exposed to outside birds. Some infections can be picked up from drinking water or even fresh food that got caught somewhere where you didn't see it so it didn't get tossed out and he found it.

Without at least a Gram Stain, you will never know what the problem might be. I, personally, have taken birds older than 13 to see avian vets and have found that age isn't necessarily a deciding factor in treating a sick bird. I have a 15 yr old who had a benign tumor removed from his chest and he survived quite nicely.