Until a few days ago, I had two male Zebra Finches. I rescued them from a friend in NYC (her boyfriend left them when he left, and she was going to “release them into the wild” …), kept them in my apt. in Queens for a few months, in another apt. in Upstate NY for a year and a half, and then here, in an old house even further upstate, since May.
The birds lived in a cage, in a room that we basically filled with animals because its location made it inconvenient for anything else (it was probably once–like at the turn of the century–a dining room, but a 1990s kitchen addition added fat dining room space to the house). The birds had a cage there, placed on top of the puppy’s sleeping crate, which was right next to the cage with our two ferrets. The cage was inches from a radiator, and the room also contained (a) the digital thermostat taht controlled the oil boiler (b) a carbon monoxide detector.
We recently switched the thermostat to the ON position, and it has a digital program that lets it go to different temps. at different times of the day, to conserve energy. The minimum temperature for overnights is 60 degrees F.
Now, we did have a cold snap recently. And when we got up in the morning (to our nice, warm house), the birds, sadly, were both dead. The simultaneity leads us to believe it was an environmental problem, not something internal. Our hypotheses:
(1) Too cold–they suffered from hypothermia. It’s a little strange, though, because the room they were in has gotten down to 60 degrees during the day at times. Still, this is our leading theory–perhaps they just couldn’t adapt to the sudden cold nights, or perhaps because it got cold at night, when their metabolism was running lower than during the day, they couldn’t stay active enough and warm enough.
(2) Carbon Monoxide poisoning–they died, after all, within about 2 days of our having turned the boiler back on for the season (though it does heat the tap water even in the summer). But the detector in that room seems to work (beeps when tested), it never went off, and the dog and weasels are just fine. So, seems unlikely.
(3) Illness–I also thought perhaps that the birds could have come down with some cold/flu/etc. (I didn’t observe them much the day before, so I don’t know if they were frisky or logy then) that proved fatal (esp. if exacerbated by cold temps.).
(4) Old Age–seems unlikely, as they are (I believe) only about 3 years old, and they passed away the same night
So, what killed my zebra finches? Obviously, if it’s something other than the cold (which still sucks–b/c I miss the birds and their silly cheeping–but my furry mammals can deal with the cold just fine), then I obviously want to take care of it–don’t want to wake up dead, as they say, from CO poisoning.