Littleton Animal Hospital

Budgie with crop stones

This is a picture of a 9 year old budgie who came in for his annual examination. He had no problems according to the owner and was acting completely normally at home. Everything also appeared normal on his physical exam except two hard masses were felt within his crop.

We decided to take radiographs (x-rays) of the budgie to try to figure out what these masses were. The bird was anesthetized briefly with gas anesthesia to keep him still and properly positioned while we took the x-rays. While using anesthesia does have some risks, the risks are usually very low in an otherwise healthy bird. The procedure is also actually much less stressful to the bird while done under anesthesia compared with being awake. This is a picture of one of the radiographs of the little budgie. You can see two round mineral densities in the crop in this radiograph.

After seeing the radiographs of this bird, it was decided that the best course of action would be to surgically remove the masses before they could cause problems and block the outflow of the crop into the rest of the gastrointestinal tract. We went ahead with surgery and removed these two ingluvioliths, or crop stones, from the budgie. Surgery was relatively quick as was the budgie's recovery. We were unable to find a cause for the stones in this bird but possible theories are an underlying crop infection or any disease causing decreased intestinal motility. Some ingluvioliths have been shown to have seed husks in their centers!

This case stresses the importance of annual exams so we can find abnormalities early and hopefully fix them before problems can occur.

Littleton Animal Hospital

29 King Street
Littleton, MA 01460

Phone: 978-486-3101

Fax: 978-486-0987