Tsuka has had past feather problems on one wing. one set of primaries has trouble growing in. they grow in stunted and fall out eventually. and the quills are weird. but for almost 6 months he did so well with not a single odd feather...

now, he grew in one leading flight feather and it grew in stunted (about an inch shorter than normal) and hung oddly compared to most flights. he dropped it while flying yesterday...

only thing i can think of his is history of second hand smoke in his old home.

you can see the leading primary kinda out of place. this is usually my indication that the feather is not right and you can see how short it is. this is full grown for this type of feather.




and the feather:

There seems to be a dark line running parallel to the quill, which I haven't ever seen before (not that I was paying attention) and the shape of the feather end looks odd. The tip of the quill looks odd too. But his other flight feathers corrected themselves eventually, so it's possible that this one is just taking longer to heal than the others. It looks a LOT better than some of the abnormal feathers he had in the past.

Didn't he have one flight feather that never grew back at all? Has anything changed with that one?

the ones that i thought werent growing back in, they grew back in. they took 3 months to even show back up as a pin and start growing. they were past abnormal feathers. they took a total of 4-5 months to fully grow in from the time of being knocked out.

as for the dark line in the grey, that is nothing but a trick of the camera. its just a curve in the feather. the quill tip is deformed, just like all of his past feathers. i inspected his feathers on both wings, and only one other looks like it might follow this pattern too but it is still a blood feather so we will see once it finally grows in

Obviously a very abnormal growth pattern, but the feathers were normal so maybe the new feathers will grow in normally in the future. He's making progress and maybe getting slowly detoxified from all the crap he was exposed to.

so you think it was his past too that caused these abnormalities? i will dig out the photos of his past feathers

My medical knowledge is almost non-existent so I don't really know. But the circumstantial evidence kinda points that way. He came from a smoke-filled house and had a lot of medical problems, and the feather issue is improving (what about the breathing problem - has that gotten any better?). Tobacco smoke has a lot of heavy metals and other poisons, and if that stuff is slowly leaving his body then maybe that's why his feathers have gotten better. He's on a better diet now too which would contribute to the improvement.

P.S. The quill tip is typical of what I see when a primary gets knocked out before it's finished growing. So maybe this one wasn't fully grown yet. Maybe the growth rate slowed down before it was finished.

comparison to normal feathers... normal 2 on right, abnormal 2 on left



these are all the deformed feathers. i have them grouped and numbered. the number stands for the amount of times the feather came out and i have them grouped with the same feather...






actually just comparing... this is new, this is a feather from his GOOD wing, which is a first.

as for the breathing problem, with his weight loss (good thing, hes fat) hes improved a bit. we've also been adding pure hibiscus tea to his drinking water to help with that.

Maybe the new feather got knocked loose early on and never fully recovered? I really don't know what the problem is, but it seems like he's gradually improving. So hopefully everything will be OK in the long run.

i hope you are right. at least for this feather. it might be the case. the others, im not so sure. but i think you are right in this case because its isolated and has never affected this wing before. and all his others grew in nicely.