Parakeet care help
- Thread starter Bonne46
- Start date
The vet I work for specializes in avian medicine, an important thing for birds is to not feed them seeds as a primary food. Pellets are 100% better than a seed diet, there are multiple problems with seeds. The first being that sometimes they have little to nothing in them so it looks like your giving alot of food but some are just shells. Also it says they have "vitamins" on them, which they do, but birds dont eat the shells so they dont actually take in the vitamins. In addition adding vitamins to a birds water does them very little to no good as they hardly drink the water if you've ever noticed, it is not a suitable way to supplement the needed vitamins. If fed the proper pellet diet you do not have to supplement with vitamins. You can feed your bird a variety of table foods (I am sure there is a book with a list of yes and no's). Now dietary problems can take a long time to show (unless the bird starts laying eggs in which case deficiencies will show very quickly and may be lethal) but the important thing is to start the bird off right. If its a new bird to you from a pet store its probably relatively young so you should have no problem getting it to change from a seed to a pellet diet unless it was from a very knowledgeable breeder/pet store that has them on pellets already.
AA,
I have 2 parakeets and read that the pellets were better too. Right now, I have them on a diet mix of seed and some kind of fruity pellet mixed in. The problem I have is when I tried converting them to the pellets only, they seemed to refuse to eat it. I tried doing it the way of mixing the pellets in and slowly removing more and more seeds until it was pellets only but they always seemed to work around the pellets to get to the seed and then when there was pellets only, they did not eat at all.... are they any tricks to getting them to switch?
I have 2 parakeets and read that the pellets were better too. Right now, I have them on a diet mix of seed and some kind of fruity pellet mixed in. The problem I have is when I tried converting them to the pellets only, they seemed to refuse to eat it. I tried doing it the way of mixing the pellets in and slowly removing more and more seeds until it was pellets only but they always seemed to work around the pellets to get to the seed and then when there was pellets only, they did not eat at all.... are they any tricks to getting them to switch?
Unfortunately this is a pretty common problem with adult birds that were raised on seeds. What you did with the mixing them and trying to ween them off was exactly what you were supposed to do and has the best chance of working, the only other thing I can recommend you do that sometimes work is get colored pellets and spread them around on a newspaper or something on the floor (depending on the size of the cage/aviary) and sometimes this will initiate a foraging instinct and they will eat them. This is also good stimulation for birds that are on pellets to stimulate them a bit. Also frequently birds will only eat one color of pellet (when the foraging technique works almost always the bird eats only one or two of the assortment of colors). At this point if they refuse to eat pellets at all then you have no choice but to remain on seeds, however there are ways to supplement their diet to make up for it. Using "soft foods" (mashed potatoes, eggs, etc) and putting vitamin powder on that is a great way to supplement their food since most birds love it and will eat the vitamins on it as well. You may have to play around with what foods your bird likes the best as and can certainly vary it too, I hear about the most success with scrambled eggs.
Another question, they are on a food with pellets and seeds now (and eat both?) when you tried to convert did you use the pellets in your food (remove the seeds manually) or did you try a different pellet food?
