LOL, CJ. She certainly knows what's what. I've seen them many times move right in as soon as the feeder is changed-- obviously watching. PS I use 3:1 too.

They do seem to like roads. A few years ago a turkey hen with some half-grown chicks visited my yard every day (I put bird seed on the ground). One day I heard frantic turkey noises from the direction of the road and went to see what was going on. The hen had apparently gotten half of her brood across the road when a car appeared and the chicks in the middle of the road just hunkered down in front of the car. This is a narrow low-traffic road and the driver was sitting there laughing. I shooed the chicks off the road, to the great relief of the hen. She took her brood off into the woods. Claire

Even if the food isn't the problem, please for his long term health, switch the food to something that is not mostly fillers and artificial color. Think about this- dogs are color blind! There is no need to potentially poison a dog to make his food look more colorful. Some of the artificial colors used in dog foods are banned from human foods because of risk of cancer. Even if they don't cause cancer, you have to ask yourself, why should your dog eat something that does not have a taste, smell, or any nutritional value? As a vet tech, I could tell a Bil Jac-fed dog just by the soft consistency and odd reddish color of its poop, even if the owner wasn't complaining of soft stools or other GI problems. Once you start asking, they say "oh yeah, he's always been a bit gassy" or "oh yeah, he's always had soft stool or poops 4-6 times a day and it seems like a lot for such a little dog" or something similar. That's because the fillers, or what Bil Jac calls main ingredients, are not easily digested by dogs (or at all). Sorry, I have soapbox issues with nutrition. Now that I got that out of my system... If after switching diet (gradually over the course of a week or 2) nothing improves within 4-6 weeks, then you're looking at another problem. I'd still not go back to Bil Jac- stick to a quality diet. Could easily be GI parasites. Have to do a fecal exam and/or a fecal direct smear with FRESH stool (for coccidia, giardia) to find them, but GI parasites are easily treatable. Most heartworm preventatives include a dewormer that helps control many GI parasites, but not coccidia. Plus dog parks are parasite paradise, and the parasite load can overwhelm HWP. So if your dog isn't on HWP for the winter, he could have easily picked up a load of parasites at the park. To me, that's the most obvious differential and it's cheap and easy to find out and cheap and easy to both cure and prevent in the future. Personally I like to start with cheap and easy :) If the parasite theory doesn't pan out, it could be any number of other things, but since a routine panel was normal you're looking at more extensive (expensive) testing. Cross that bridge if and when you get to it. My Aleksander was like that as a pup. He had similar symptoms. First thing we did was stool exam and he had roundworms, so we dewormed him. Still had intermittent diarrhea. Did a fecal direct exam and he had coccidia, so we treated that. Still had diarrhea so we did a cbc, chem, UA and nothing showed up on that. Thought he had food allergies and switched him to every Hills prescription diet they had at the time. Still had diarrhea. Vet decided it was stress colitis. At that point I decided that a dog can have diarrhea on any food not just Hill's so I started feeding him Nature's Recipe chicken and rice. Diarrhea cleared up. Nature's Recipe had the exact same ingredients as Hills ID (for intestinal issues) except one major thing- the Hills dry foods were preserved with BHA and BHT. The Nature's Recipe food was preserved with vitamin E. I concluded that Aleksander was sensitive to BHA and BHT and avoided foods with those preservatives, and he never had a problem like that again. I'm sure his parasite problem was not helping his diarrhea, but clearing the parasites didn't clear the diarrhea. So you just have to keep re-evaluating the response to treatment and take things step-wise. There's no need to break the bank for more bloodwork and do invasive testing such as intestinal biopsies if you haven't covered the basics yet. Good luck to you and your little dog. Oh, and what's his name?

Good afternoon! It is possible that you are simply witnessing territorial display behavior from Mr. Bluebird. Mrs. Bluebird is on the nest, he sees his reflection in the window, and wants the "competing" male out of his territory. I have a flock of 22 BBs that spend all day, every day, at my feeding station throughout the winter. They get along fine, until about March 1st; now the males fight, continuously. Both nest boxes on the property are already claimed, but the homemade "crumble" at the feeder keeps all of them around, so the battles rage on. (I am all the way up in NH)