My parrot is a 27 year old...

Question
My parrot is a 27 year old Yellownape Amazon. Pedro. His droppings have been dark colored "globs" for a couple of weeks . His appetite is less than normal but his preening and hormonal activities are as usual. His disposition is slightly altered from his usual edgy self. My concern is that he might have diarhea or some other ailment and I need to know of any changesin his diet that might help - like all rice? He eats what we eat - eggs, vegies,loves mashed potatoes- etc. the only constant is sunflower seeds. Fresh filtered water each day. He has the run of the house [he can't fly] for a few hours each day. Such a long question but who ever put this large window for the question is an enabler.
                      Thank you..........

Answer
Hi Mary,
  I am so, so sorry that it has taken me a week to answer. We have an option on here to set an "on vacation" status in case we know we will not be able to answer questions for any period of time. I set mine over a week ago as I knew I was going to be without access to a computer until today. I came back on today and logged in to make myself available for questions again and found one from you thay has been waiting all this time! Apparently my "away" status was never activated.  I hope by now that Pedro is doing better. Has his appetite and behavior returned to normal again? How about his droppings?. You know, over Christmas my 20 year old macaw Polo did something very similar to what you have described. His droppings became just dark globs one day and I was seeing no traces of urates/urine at all. This normally very active bird was much quieter than usual and would stop in the middle of playing on the floor and fall asleep.  I rushed him to the vet and they found nothing wrong. The next day he was back to normal.
 
You asked about changes in diet that might help with the situation you were describing. If you had just been seeing a change for a day in his droppings or even a couple of days, I might have said to try a temporary diet change. BUT coupled with a decreased appetite and behavior changes, I would not advise anything other than a trip as soon as possible to an avian vet. Birds mask illness so well that usually by the time we start to see that they are sick, they are too sick to help. It sounds like Pedro is well loved and has a fairly good diet (though I am not a big advocate of sunflower seeds as a staple in the diet) and so I wonder if he had gotten into something toxic during his time out of the cage or if maybe with his advanced age he is developing some other problems.

Please accept again my apology for not answering you right away. I had no idea that I had a question waiting since I had logged myself unavailable. I hope you will let me know how Pedro is doing and then maybe we can take it from there.

And yes...that whoever created the big field for questions here must be an enabler but you know what? I like the long detailed question. For one they show me that I am dealing with an owner who cares (like you) and it also helps when I have a good deal of information to work with when answering a question.

I hope to hear from you that Pedro is doig better now.

Jan