So what is your parrot eating?
Originally published at Harmonic Pets. Please leave any comments there.
As I get ready for
the upcoming bird fair, which involves baking birdy bread muffins and mixing up more of our Grains & Goodness, I’m also going to be working on a large display board that asks the question: what is your parrot eating?
You might have several answers to that question, such as seeds, pellets, or people food. But for the most part, I think a lot of people feed their birds like they feed cats or dogs. Pour the kibble in the bowl, trust the manufacturers claims, and that’s that. They feed their birds pellets because we’re all told to feed our birds pellets. Seed is bad the magazines say, because it lacks nutrition and is full of fat. That’s true, but I also think that it over simplifies things when it comes to feeding parrots, too.
So what is your parrot eating? If you’re a parrot in my house, you get a base diet which for the big guy is pellets, and for the parrotlet is Volkman’s parrotlet seed mix. (He’s a dilute blue and there’s been some research done that pellets aren’t good for mutation parrotlets.) Then, the fun begins. Nutriberries, cook and serve foods, sharing healthy pieces of my dinner (Braynon loves green peppers!), a bit of brown rice or pasta if that’s what we’re having for supper…from day to day my birds never know what the entire make up of their dinner is going to be. And that’s great.
Imagine if you were given a bowl of cereal-like food every day (pellets). Even if they look like and possibly taste like Fruit Loops, that’s got to get boring. I mean I love Fruit Loops or Captain Crunch with Crunchberries, but feed it to me every day…. I’d get really bored really quick.
Parrots evolved in the wild to eat many different things. So mix it up. Use food hiders. Take a clean toilet paper roll (cut along it’s long edge so it unrolls and no one can get stuck) and fill it with millet sprays for a smaller bird to play with. There are drawers and maze toys galore for foraging play. And each of these can hold something different.
Take a kale leaf and use a clothes pin to hang it to the side of the cage.
The ideas for foraging, and for feeding your parrot are endless. So as I mix up some Grains and Goodness and eagerly await a fresh shipment from the distributor of some other items, I have to ask, what is your parrot eating….and what does your parrot think about this?