My parakeet looks hurt!

Question
My parakeet has either broken it's foot, or tail. We are not sure. We recently seperated it from our other bird, by giving it a smaller cage, because our green bird (boy) kept pecking at our blue bird,(the injured one) and she kept falling. It still walks funny, and we are afraid it will die. What should we do? We don't want to take it to the vet, because it's expensive. What should we do?

Answer
Hi, Genesis.

A bird can't break its tail.  The tail is nothing more than long feathers, no bone.  The end of your keet's tail is actually at the base of its body...the tail feathers grow out from there.  If your bird's foot or leg are broken, the broken part will just hang...should be fairly easy to determine if either are broken.  It's possible your bird has an foot/leg/shoulder injury of some sort from falling.  I cannot determine this from the information you've provided.  It may be necessary for you to take your bird to an avian veterinarian for a diagnosis of the problem if the problem persists.  Depending on how long it's been since the injury occurred, it can sometimes take a couple of weeks for the bird to heal on its own, but this depends on what the problem is.  I realize vets can be expensive, but this may be what you need to do in order to find out what ails your bird.

Chrys