My custom food mix for small parrots
Five years ago, I published this article below, detailing the diet I was using for many years for my flock of small parrots in the mid to late 2010s.
The dry diet mix at that time was just a custom mix of three other dry diet mixes, and I’ve long been keen on designing my own diet. I’ve written extensively about diet over the past 6 years, so a lot of research went into the formation of this new diet. Here were some of the goals I had in mind.
Note that this article is only about the dry diet, so see my previous article for recommendations about fresh food and other important elements of a healthy bird diet.
More sprouted nuts and seeds
Although Christine’s Chop Shop mix contains some dehydrated sprouted seeds, I wanted to include sprouted nuts as well as a much higher content and variety of sprouted seeds. There are at least two great online sources of sprouted seeds: Blue Mountain Organics and Nuts.com. It’s also becoming increasingly easier to buy sprouted seeds in markets, although the cost can be quite high. With Blue Mountain Organics, especially, buying larger bags can bring the price down to where it’s competitive with non-sprouted foods.
Although this new mix is mostly individual ingredients, I’m still using Christine’s Chop Shop’s mix as it’s got some really great stuff in it that’s expensive or difficult to find in small quantities. It’s got dried chop in it, which can be yet another way to get green food into the diet. It also has dried spices, which are a great enrichment for the senses.
More nuts overall
The seed mixes contain some nuts, but it’s far less than I want my birds to be eating. Nuts are an incredible source of essential fatty acids, which, as the name tells you, are not just good for you; they are essential nutrients that cannot be manufactured by your bird and must be obtained in a diet.
Essential fatty acids, or EFAs, are fatty acids that are required by humans and other animals for normal physiological function that cannot be synthesized in the body.
Higher percentage of high-fat seeds
And speaking of essential fatty acids, the lower-fat seeds that are predominant in small parrot mixes, like those for budgies and cockatiels, translate to lower fatty acid content. I wanted to introduce a higher content of certain seeds, such as chia, hemp, flax, pumpkin, and sunflower and de-emphasise seeds such as canary seed, millet, and oats.
More seed variety
Many commercial diet mixes, especially those for small parrots, focus on only a few varieties of seed. I wanted to introduce more variety, including seeds such as quinoa, sorghum, and buckwheat. Sorghum was especially interesting as it’s the most common seed that cockatiels have been observed eating in the wild, but never appears in a cockatiel mix.
But, what will my birds actually eat?
An important part of this process was determining whether my birds would actually eat some of the new food items I was considering. Given they’d not seen them before and seeds must actually be openable by the birds, I had to make sure they could actually eat them.
The way I usually feed my birds is to give them only enough so that they finish off all their dry diet by the end of the day. What I would do is reduce their current dry diet by a small amount and then put out a separate bowl with a new item in it for at least a week and observe them.
There were some seeds like sorghum that did not attract interest from budgies, but cockatiels enjoyed, so I would adjust the content accordingly. It paid to be persistent, as some things like chia were ignored for quite some time, but eventually they came to devour it. Birds just take time to get used to new things, just like any creature.
When it came to nuts, I discovered that fully formed nuts were often ignored, but if I chopped them up a bit, they could carry them around, and I have a few birds that to this day love the nuts more than anything else.
Pumpkin seeds were ignored until I lightly chopped them, and now they devour them.
The diet
Here’s the current diet as of the writing of this article. I am constantly making small tweaks based on what they eat and finding new things to include or finding new research on nutrition. This makes about a six-week supply for my current flock of 9 budgies, Bourke’s parrots, and cockatiels.
I’ve provided imperial measurements, but also weights, which I’m finding to be much easier to manage and scale to larger batches.
Data comes courtesy of My Food Data.
Additional information
For the mixed nuts and pumpkin seeds, I’m using a Swiss Chop Chop. For the pumpkin seeds, it’s just 4 pulls on the Chop Chop to slice the seeds into multiple pieces. For the nuts, I’m doing about 12-20 pulls on the Chop Chop, shaking periodically. I’m looking for cutting the nuts into small enough pieces for the birds to carry but not so small that it becomes mostly powder.
After mixing all the ingredients, I tumble the mix thoroughly in a container to mix the ingredients evenly and also coat the mix with diatomaceous earth.
Cost
I’m able to bring the costs down quite a bit by purchasing larger bags of the raw ingredients, either 1 or 5 pounds, and then freezing the remainder to use later. My cost comes down to 17 cents per bird per day. This is comparably priced to what a bag of commercial dry mix like Harvey’s Colossal Cockatiel, which I’ve used in the past. If you purchase in smaller quantities, the cost can increase substantially.
Blue Mountain Organics is also substantially cheaper than Nuts.com, which is cheaper than buying from a high-end grocery store, where you might have to go to find sprouted nuts.
Success?
The contents of the diet are rooted in science, but unfortunately, I don’t bring my birds to the vet regularly for checkups as I don’t like to traumatise them. So, I don’t have any solid data to prove this diet is leading to better health outcomes.
Anecdotally, we’ve had quite a few long-lived birds over the years and we’ve not had birds develop chronic diseases, with the exception of some of our rescue birds that were already ailing when we first adopted them. We’ve had a cockatiel live to her late 20s, and budgies and Bourke’s parrots live into their teens.
Our flock was quite healthy and active before switching to this improved diet, but we’ve seen marked behavioral improvement in our older birds especially. We had some very old Bourke’s parrots that are among our oldest rescued birds. Their feather condition improved noticeably and their activity levels went from more stoic to quite a bit more active.
Our teenaged budgie became noticeably more active and a better flier in the last few years of his life after switching to this diet. He came to us with existing liver problems and an abdominal tumor, but seemed to roll back the years on the new diet.
Conclusion
Just like in humans, a diet that is as minimally processed as possible and as close to what might be found in a wild diet leads to the best health outcomes.
Read more of my articles about diet.