Bird-Shaped Bags of Maggots

 We get a lot of backyard chickens submitted to the lab for necropsy. The State Vet has a grant that pays for the necropsies and surveillance testing of these birds, so there is no cost to the owners. It's a good way to encourage people to submit birds. And it allows the lab to keep at least a partial eye on reportable diseases in the backyard bird population that represent threats to the commercial poultry industry in the state. 

Unlike commercial poultry, which are usually submitted live, with as many as 10 to 20 birds per case, backyard birds are usually already dead when the owners bring them to the lab, and there is usually just one bird per case. 

I've seen enough backyard birds wrapped up in Walmart plastic bags or scented trash bags that just the sight (or smell) of either is enough for me to know it's a backyard bird necropsy. For the record, scented trash bags, and scented dog poop bags, make me gag. The smell of dog shit layered with "baby fresh" scent is just nasty. It still smells like shit, but now with extra steps. A dead bird wrapped in a scented trash bag is still just as dead.

Many backyard bird owners don't know much about livestock husbandry. Their intentions may be good but execution is often weak. We see chickens stuffed with intestinal worms, literally so many worms that the chicken starved to death because no food could pass the ball of worms in its gut. We see birds filled with tumors caused by the Marek's disease herpesvirus. That disease is reliably preventable with a vaccine administered by a hatchery at the day of hatch. We hear tales of woe in which the owner got some birds from a neighbor, from the nice lady at the flea market, from this guy over in Conway, and they put the new (surprise! diseased!) birds in their flock with no quarantine period, and ended up with a visit from a livestock inspector come to depopulate their entire flock because they now all have a very transmissible, reportable disease. I ask owners about their biosecurity measures, and get a puzzled head tilt from most of them. But all of that is ultimately a matter of education. 

One small problem with some backyard bird owners is that they wait too long to bring us a dead bird. Autolysis, the changes that happen to tissues after death, is rapid in birds. I don't expect most people to know about autolysis, but I do expect them to have at least a basic idea about the other thing that happens to dead animals that are outside for more than a few hours. And that thing is maggots.

I don't do maggots. 

Thankfully, the surveillance tests we conduct can be performed with a tracheal swab so I don't need to dive in and collect rotten tissues. I've had enough bird-shaped bags of maggots submitted for necropsy that my techs know that I won't even unwrap those birds all the way. Once I see maggots spilling out of the Walmart bag shrouds, I cut a hole in the bags for the head, flick maggots out of the bird's mouth to swab the trachea then tell my techs, I don't want to see any more of this. And away it goes to the incinerator, maggots and all.