New Birds and Mites

[Kittengames]

So I've read through several older threads before posting just to see if my questions were answered and I got close but....
So, situation(sorry for the huge story)
I had finches years ago.. Loved them and went through a few big catastrophes with them including losing 2 full aviaries when someone melted part of a plastic bread bag on the stove in the kitchen...I was devastated and haven't had birds since then so probably close to 8 years...

My daughter Bought me 2 pairs of Zebra finches for Christmas, completely last minute(literally on Christmas eve) because in planning out a bird purchase for herself I guess I talked her ear off about the finches I missed...
So the same night I brought my guys home she adopted some budgies from some very poor conditions(her goal was a parrot but when she seen the place these guys came from she couldn't say no...) So bringing them home our concern was keeping them locked away from the cats we didn't even consider quarantine(I'm a little rusty my mistake) so the budgies and finches, same room.

Fast forward a few days...to last Tuesday actually to taking these surprisingly Healthy appearing budgies to a local exotic bird breeder to have their wings clipped...and to deal with some damaged blood feathers(a couple which were still bleeding, we have a mean girl in the bunch) so turns out our healthy birds have the start of a feather mite infestation no visible adult mites...(I've dealt with asm before but not feather mites so queue the instant panic and the horror at having brought them into his aviary building)

The kind gentleman who clipped their wings for us sprayed them all for me though was waiting on a supply shipment of the spray so he had us pic up some diatomaceous earth. So we came home washed everything, dusted everything...and have been dusting all the bigger birds daily since... but... finches... tiny...
I don't think it had spread to them yet and currently there is... a nice ring of dust all around their cage(think a salt circle from supernatural paranoid much right lol)
but its been a week now...and I am still paranoid, I have a spray coming in the mail which I will treat everyone with...but the budgies have a slight click to their breathing not quite as bad as when my old finches had asm but enough to put me on edge and think about treating everyone just in case...because I am darned paranoid.
So what I used 8 years ago was Ivermectin in their water...and hard to find info at that time I ended up using an edible paste for horses, diluted to finch dosage.
So the Threads I was reading suggested a topical application but the solution my feed store had was a 10% and also like 60$ so I grabbed the same product I used 8 years ago...because I used a portion of the paste and diluted into a 4ltr jug and then dosed from there...works out to 0.4ml per 10gram finch... It worked well before I only lost one of 46 birds and that was before they were dosed...but my thoughts on that are...can the oral medication be absorbed topically...
Looking for some thoughts on this, I talk my self into and out of things equally well and need some outside opinions...I might be overly paranoid but reading that many aviaries are treated somewhat regularly as a preventative measure makes me less hesitant to treat before absolute confirmed mites...if that makes sense.
So thank you for Bearing with me through all of that, I really did need to get my thoughts out there...

[lovezebs]

Kittengames

Hi there, and welcome to the Forum.

To reply to your question....
I honestly don't know. I have never heard of using horse meds for Zebra Finches.

You can order things like SCATT on line, if you have no Avian Vet in your area. It is applied topically to the skin.

[Kittengames]

Thanks for the welcome.
I have a spray coming, um a pyrethin based one I believe(I compared ingredients to the scat and s76 I think they were and it had similar) but will be another week before arriving.

When I had finches before the only medication I could find was the horse one, without going into ultra huge bulk and things like injectable sort of scared me so I would never have thought to use the drop on the skin with that. I had only one Avian vet here and they refused to even talk to me unless I brought all of my birds in at about $75 per bird for the office visit...so the only information I could find at that time was...Ivermectin...and Farm supply store lol oh, and that sometimes adding to the water was hard because they could taste it and possibly refuse to drink...and the Horse paste is apple flavored...

[Kittengames]

looking at some of the posts about weather to use cattle ivomec or sheep...the farm place here has the brown box...and it is for horse sheep and cattle...

[Sally]

I use Scatt for possible mites, it is easy to dose each bird individually. I prefer it to products that go in the water, because I can't be sure that each bird gets the proper dose when it is in the water. I use Avian Insect Liquidator for other parasites/pests. It is an excellent spray, totally safe for even baby birds. These are two products I won't be without. Some use the horse ivermectin, but again, it is diluted in water, and you don't know if the birds take in a proper dose, so I don't recommend it.

Welcome to the forum! There's lots of good reading at www.finchinfo.com, where you will find many articles on finch care. If you put your general location in your profile, it makes it easier for members to direct you to places to buy supplies, etc.

[Sojourner]

TL;DNR = DO NOT EVER USE HORSE IVOMEC/ivermectin for any animal other than HORSES. There is EXTRA stuff in it that is TOXIC. And due to problems determining and delivering an EXACT dosage, also probably not very safe to use the cattle/swine stuff on birds either.

RE Ivermectin AKA Ivomec - for CATTLE or SWINE, not for horses.

This product is routinely used for a wide variety of animals because it is PURE ivermectin (in propylene glycol as a carrier). I used it to treat for heartworm in my dogs because it is a FRACTION of the cost of buying the stuff meant for dogs from the vet. A TINY fraction.

It is also used for ferrets and cats (cats do get heartworm too) for the same purpose.

Ivermectin is not water soluble, it has to be diluted with propylene glycol (or something similar). You couldn't put it in their water anyway. I have no idea what the paste is using as a carrier but it would have to be something non-water soluble ... who knows how much, if any, ivermectin your birds got that time you used it. I wouldn't do that again if I were you.

The problem is finding safe dosing for your birds, which will differ from other animals for a whole lot of reasons.

HOWEVER. If you have moderately good math skills, and if you can find a medication FOR BIRDS that uses ivermectin, you can calculate the correct dosage (and the concentration of ivermectin you need to administer that dosage) from the dosage and concentration of the commercial medication.

Birds are trickier than dogs, cats, and ferrets because of their tiny size and their superfast metabolisms. While there is a wide safety range for dosage of ivermectin in mammals, in the tiny doses birds get even a "wide" safety range doesn't give you much room for error.

In any case ABSOLUTELY DO NOT USE THE HORSE STUFF. It has other things in it that are TOXIC. Horses are GINORMOUS compared to birds. There is no way to tell if the other stuff in the horse version can be diluted enough not to be harmful to birds - but the toxic stuff definitely is still harmful to dogs, cats and ferrets even after its been diluted for them.

Plus - not water soluble. So when you diluted the horse paste with WATER, the most likely scenario (given most of your birds survived) is that you were pouring off plain water (plus whatever is in horse paste that is actually water soluble) out of that 4L container, leaving most of the ivermectin behind floating on top of the water.

I believe you got off lucky with the equine Ivomec. Please don't ever use that again.

As for bad taste in water - with horses, dogs, cattle, swine, and cats we use PROPYLENE glycol to make the medicine go down.

Not ethylene glycol, that is highly toxic. PROPYLENE GLYCOL. There is no evidence that the consumption of small amounts of propylene glycol ingested by birds has any short-term ill effects.

HOWEVER the ivomec for swine and cattle is supposed to be injected and it has propylene glycol in it as a carrying agent for the ivermectin. THAT is known to cause lesions in birds (if you actually inject it).

I have no idea if propylene glycol might cause similar problems in birds if applied topically.

I'm actually not sure if you're trying to administer this topically or in the water, but neither is very safe.

The least dangerous method of getting this into a bird would be DIRECT application of a closely titered dosage via a dropper or (needle-less) syringe directly into the beak.

Honestly, for birds I think this course is too risky because we don't have a medication for birds that uses ivermectin that I know of to make the correct calculations. And even if we did have that information, you MUST dose the birds individually, you cannot just put it in their water even if it WERE water-soluble (which it isn't).

Personally, speaking as a person who is confident in medicating my animals on my own whenever possible, this whole scenario with trying to use livestock Ivomec to treat tiny birds is WAY WAY to fraught with risk.

And given the extra TOXIC stuff in horse Ivomec, plus whatever the paste itself is made up of, you really dodged a bullet. I wouldn't suggest taking that risk again.

EDIT: I almost forgot. I do have an online reference that might be useful in this and a lot of other situations.

http://avianmedicine.net/content/uploads/2013/03/37.pdf

Actually the above reference does seem to imply that topically applying ivermectin to birds is safe, but it is unclear (or at least not clear enough for me) that the propylene glycol itself is safe (or rather what amount of PG would be safe) for topical application. I would want more and clearer references clarifying that issue before I would take the risk myself rather than relying on just this one reference as "support" for the putative safety of topical application of cattle/swine Ivomec for birds.

Also - no mention of safe dosages in the section I read.