>From:    Nancy C Tubb <[log in to unmask]>
>Any ferret owners out there have experience with ferrets and pet birds -
>particularly parrots or birds larger than a canary or budgie?
 
*nod* We do have experience with this.  We currently have six ferrets and
four birds (two budgies and two cockatiels).  The birds live in a cage in
teh living room, and we usually open the cage and have them out and about
all day.  The ferrets live in our bedroom and aren't allowed anywhere else
in the house -- partly because of the other creatures, partly because they
get into everything, and partly because of my infant daughter.  Generally,
this situation works well for us.
 
However, we have had one near-fatal incident between a ferret and bird.
Coffee is our ferret with the most honed hunting instincts.  She's tried to
kill our rats, she once open her own cage and then a gerbil cage and killed
a family of gerbils -- with some help from a couple of the other ferrets.
If she does happen to be out of the bedroom, she's constantly trying to get
into the big rat cage and have a snack.
 
Anyway, this was shortly after our daughter, Katrina was born.  She was
still getting up in the middle of the often to eat, so we put the ferrets in
a cage for the night and left the baby gate that is in our bedroom door open
to make it easier for me to get up and deal with the baby.  Kirk forgot to
close the birds in for the night, partly because they always went into their
cage to go to sleep whether or not we closed the door and locked them in
(all four birds live together).  Well, Coffee got out of the ferret cage by
squeezing out by a corner of the door.  We're guessing she found the open
cage and sniffed around to see what was in there, and frightened the birds
into jumping and flapping around.  I was woken by a bird screaming very
loudly, jumped out of bed and found Coffee behind the stereo with Snow, our
white-faced female cockatiel, in her mouth and it looked like Snow had
Coffee's eye in her beak.
 
Kirk and I seperated them with some difficulty -- and I honestly don't
remember exactly how we did it, just that we got them apart and Coffee was
hanging in Kirk's hands like she was dead and Snow was standing on my arm
screaming and holding her wing like it was broken.  I think I about had a
heart attack and died on the spot.
 
Well, we turned the lights on, and Coffee was just fine.  Snow had gotten
her by the eyelid and the only damage Snow managed to do was chewing off
some of the fur.
 
Snow was very upset and wouldn't let us examine her, nto to mention her mate
Spice was panicked that we didn't let him check her over right away.  We
didn't see any blood, so put her in her cage for a little while to let her
calm down.  A few hours later, I checked her over again and this time saw
some blood on her chest feathers, so we took her up to Dr. Bock to check her
out.  He trimmed away aobut half of her chest feathers and the feathers
under her right wing and there were punctures all over.  Luckily, none went
into the air sac, any internal organs, or crushed any bones.  He cleaned out
the wounds and gave us some injectible Baytril shots to give her at home so
she wouldn't get an infection.  She lived just fine (we also kept a heater
near her cage for a while so she didn't get too cold from shock).  Her
feathers are almost entirely grown back, and other than the fact that she
holds her right wing a little awkwardly sometimes, she make a complete
recovery.
 
However, when the ferrets are caged, we always put bricks in front of hte
cage door, and we always double check that the birds are locked in before
we go to bed or leave the house.  Next time we probably wouldn't be so lucky.
 
Michelle
Flutist
 
--
Meet my pets.  The ferrets (Taz, Coffee, Daphne, Tia, Gretchen, and
Beelzebub), the gerbils (26 of them), the rats (five of them), the budgies
(Sky and Cindy), the cockatiels (Snow and Spice), and the fish (various).
RIP Honey, Summer, Grendel, Peggie, Timmy, Racer, Sue, and Perrin.
[Posted in FML issue 1844]