(Excerpt from the Essentialbird yahoo group)

Yesterday I came home from grocery shopping to find that a male from my large flock of gouldian finches was really sick. He lives in an 18 foot flight, so these birds are in constant motion. The sick male was completely fluffed up with his head tucked in even though all the other birds were flying back and forth around him. When I caught him, he was very weak and his eyes were barely open. In the fifteen years that I have been breeding gouldians, I have never seen one bounce back once they are this far gone (until I learned about  therapeutic EOs!).

I placed him in a small cage with a heat lamp over his head and hung up several millet sprays all around him. He could barely eat the millet he was so puffy and weak. The heat did not help with the puffiness, which is a really bad sign.

I placed a diffuser about two feet away from his head and filled it with the antibiotic essential oil formula  Thieves from Young Living. I let the diffuser run for a couple of hours. He got steadily worse, sitting in a puff with his head tucked in. At this point, I assumed that he must have had a heart attack or something, and that there was no way to save him, so I turned off the diffuser and decided to take a bath. As I was heading up stairs, it occurred to me, as a last resort, to diffuse another antibiotic formula from Young Living called Purification. I didn’t think it would work since the Thieves had not helped at all, and I thought perhaps the strong odors of lemongrass and tea tree in the formula might push him over the edge. But for some reason, I wanted to give it one last try. I turned the diffuser on, went to the bath,  obsessed the whole time about whether I should get out and check on him, but decided not to. About an hour later, when I came back downstairs, I immediately checked the floor of the gould’s sick cage assuming he would have died, but not finding him there, I realized he was eating and flying around! I kept the diffuser running on him for about nine more hours using the Purification, and when I got up this morning, he was back to normal.

I can’t believe this one!

Lainey Alexander

Disclaimer: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, or by any veterinarian. All information, including any product or technique mentioned, is for educational purposes only. None of the information is intended to diagnose or treat any disease.