Get her to a vet, or a vet on a call, this hour. Nothing you read in the next ten minutes replaces that.
The other, more common arrival is the day after. A bird went overnight, or was gone before dinner, and you’re trying to make sense of what happened. Birds hide illness by design; a chicken or a budgie stays upright and eating as long as her body will let her, and the collapse an owner sees is often the end of a long private decline. That’s not a comfort, but it’s the honest frame — you were not necessarily meant to catch it earlier.
The pattern behind sudden loss is almost never nothing. Stress on a compromised heart, an unrecognised respiratory infection, a slow-growing tumour, a toxin in the run — a vet who hears your bird’s history and the way she went can usually tell you which family it fell in, and that answer is often what helps most. For the wider map of what can go wrong, our bird health guide is where these pages sit alongside everything else.
If it’s happening right now — laboured breathing, seizures, an unresponsive bird — go in person. Talk to an avian vet.
Birds hide illness until they can't, so a death that looks sudden usually wasn't — the most common causes vets see in pet birds and backyard flocks, and what you can piece together from the last few days to make sense of it.
The dosing walkthrough for the antiparasitic most bird keepers ask about — what it treats, and where a vet must confirm.
Bird flu — avian influenza — is a family of viruses that live naturally in wild birds.
Scaly leg mites burrow under the scales on a hen's legs and lift them into rough, chalky ridges — the earliest signs to catch, and the treatments that kill the mite without damaging the leg underneath.
Mites hide in the feather bases and in coop cracks, not just on the bird — a look at which mite you're dealing with, and the two-front treatment that clears them for good.
