Quail illness that I can't diagnose

goldqueen3 · Dec 5, 2018

I have been raising quail for a while now. I hatched these out my self from my quail's eggs. They aren't old enough to go outside in the cold weather yet..
1 female quail started where she could not stand..on further inspection, i noticed she was very thin, put her in bird hospital with heated light...fed her what she would eat...no improvement after 2 weeks,she actually lost even more weight. Ended up culling her. Inspection of internal organs--green-grey colored liver???? what did she have

DK newbie · Dec 5, 2018

Wow, that's quite a symptom.. Someone must have heard of a disease that can cause a green liver. Everything else was normal?

goldqueen3 · Dec 7, 2018

only that she had no muscle left. when I first noticed she was sick, she was laying next to the food..Immediately I noticed how thin she was so I put her in a heated area and let her eat what she wanted which was never much...she would drink when held next to the water....she withered away. NO MUSCLE LEFT..No other birds were affected...the dark green liver was just the only thing I could see. I had ordered some eggs to put with my eggs..could it be something genetic that cause her liver to fail?? I am NOT a vet.

goldqueen3 · Dec 7, 2018

goldqueen3 said:
only that she had no muscle left. when I first noticed she was sick, she was laying next to the food..Immediately I noticed how thin she was so I put her in a heated area and let her eat what she wanted which was never much...she would drink when held next to the water....she withered away. NO MUSCLE LEFT..No other birds were affected...the dark green liver was just the only thing I could see. I had ordered some eggs to put with my eggs..could it be something genetic that cause her liver to fail?? I am NOT a vet.

pinoyathletics · Dec 10, 2018

I suspect mine might have Enteritis, they got it when the heavy rains came. I have had 6 die. One could barely walk and was weak anyway. But 5 roosters and a hen have perished in the last 2 weeks. I have no dosed my birds with Triple C.

What diseases are common with quails?

When I cut open the mail i couldn't see anything. This was my first female to die, and the first one I have ever sliced open. What i can say is female quails are way different inside.

#1 Females are definitley bigger like almost 3x bigger
#2 The Amount of organs reproductive parts etc, are bigger and more significant
#3 I saw yolk coming out of its butt, and 2 more yolk sacks forming inside so it was a very fertile bird.

What I observed which didnt look right, which i didnt see in 5 dead males.

#1 Lots of feed just stuck in the birds throat as if it had choked to death
#2 Ulcers and Lessions inside the bird around the lung area, and kidney these were red and yellow in color and looked like little bubbles.
#3 Blood clot in lungs (this was seen in other 5 birds).

Im suspecting Entertitis? I have some gruesome pictures of what it looked like when i cut the bird open.

DK newbie · Dec 10, 2018

As for feed in the throat, could it have been the crop? I've only butchered 2 quail, in the first one I didn't notice the crop at all, in the second one the crop was full and food kept coming out the esophagus as I tried to remove the organs.. Probably one had just eaten and the other hadn't.
As far as I know, enteritis is a problem of the gut - you'd expect ulcers and blood and discolored areas of the gut, not of the lungs and kidneys. It is likely a respiratory disease if the symptoms seem centered around the lungs, though the kidneys have nothing to do with breathing but if the issue became systemic (went into the blood) before it killed the bird, that could explain why the kidneys that filter the blood were affected too. You didn't take pictures, by any chance? I'm curious to see what those ulcers and lesions looked like.