DISEASES OE PARROTS. 
31 
useless efforts to relieve liimself. A little saffron boiled in 
their milk will usually cure this, but if it does not, you should 
give the bird four drops of castor-oil. It is no easy matter to 
administer castor-oil to a full-grown and strong-beaked parrot 
unless you know how. The best way is to have a piece of 
hard wood or bone, about a quarter of an inch thick and three 
quarters wide ; in the centre of this there must be a small 
hole : open the bird’s beak, put in the piece of wood, so as to 
keep it open, put a quill through the hole in the wood, and 
pour the castor-oil through the quill. 
Sudden changes in the weather, or want of proper care as j 
regards warmth, will sometimes produce inflammation. The j 
symptoms of this disease are melancholy and a disposition to j 
go to roost while it is yet daylight. If you blow up the feathers 
of the belly, you will find the extreme parts much swollen and 
a multitude of tiny red veins showing through the skin. This 
is a dangerous malady, and should be seen, to in time. If the 
bird’s bowels are relaxed, give him, until he gets better, as 
much magnesia as can be piled on a sixpence. His diet should 
be bread and milk and maw-seed. A little port wine in his 
water will do him no harm. As the magnesia will sink, you 
had better put it in a vessel so shallow that the bird will be 
sure to disturb and partake of it when he goes to drink. Some 
parrot-keepers cure their buds of relaxation by giving them 
Indian com that has been boiled in rice-water. 
Impure water, stale food, or want of sand, wall produce 
surfeit. The head, and sometimes the back, becomes covered 
with angry sores, which discharge a humour of so acrid a 
character that wherever it runs it removes the feathers. Dis- 
solve a quarter of a pound of salt or half a pound of loaf sugar 
in a quart of spring water, and bathe the parts affected twice a 
day. Dry the sores thoroughly, and anoint them with Florence 
oil. Their diet should be as simple as possible. Dice-bread, 
scalded with milk, is the best food while the surfeit continues, 
and nothing else should be given, but keep the bird warm. 
As I have already observed, through a foolish indulgence in 
animal food, parrots pluck themselves quite bald in places, and 
make themselves look extremely ugly. The best thing to do is 
to bathe the bald parts with a strong pickle of salt and spring 
water, and to diet the bird strictly on bread and milk. I have 
heard that if the bird be well syringed with diluted ox-gall it 
wall cure him of this disagreeable habit, but I have never had 
an opportunity of trying the remedy. 
