12h (edited) ā¢ Vet Casesāļø
šŖ¶ Case Study: Why Are the Pheasants Dying After the Move?
Meet a flock of 200 six-week-old ring-necked pheasants on a game bird operation in Pennsylvania. They arrived three days ago after a four-hour transport from a breeding facility in another state. The stress of the move was unavoidable.
By day two the owner noticed birds huddling in corners with ruffled feathers. By day three twelve were dead.
You perform a necropsy on three birds. The moment you open the abdominal cavity and examine the spleen you stop. Each spleen is enlarged to nearly three times its normal size, and the surface is covered in scattered white to gray circular foci against a dark red background.
It looks exactly like marble.
This is marble spleen disease, caused by fowl adenovirus. The virus had likely been circulating silently in the breeding flock. The pheasant chicks carried it, their maternal antibodies waned right around six weeks of age, and the transport stress delivered the final blow by suppressing what little immune function they had left.
You look over at the pen of chickens on the same property. They are completely unaffected.
There is no antiviral treatment. You start antibiotics for secondary bacterial infections, optimize the environment, and send spleen samples for PCR confirmation.
š” The takeaway: Transport stress plus waning maternal immunity in young pheasants is a recipe for marble spleen disease.
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šŖ¶ Case Study: Why Are the Pheasants Dying After the Move?
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