FEATURE
diet, necessary to shed those unwanted fatty deposits. Your birds should be eating a healthy, varied and balanced diet. They should also be eating, fruits, vegetables, bean mix, seeds and sprouted seeds. There are foods that can boost fertility, but there are also foods that can decrease the fertility of birds.
When it comes to pellets there is often a maintenance diet and a breeding diet, with increased nutrients and protein required for breeding birds. We are spoilt for choice by the different pellet manufacturers however, beware of the pellets too high in Soya content. It is important to know exactly what goes into the pellets we choose to feed our birds. Expensive does not mean the best.
Herbalists, witches and traditional healers have long known that certain plants and herbs have a contraceptive effect. Scientists first recognized that plants contained such substances in the early 1900’s. Interest picked up in the mid 1940’s and 1950’s when sheep and goats were diagnosed with Clover
Disease. The cause of the disease was the presence of plant estrogens in clover, a plant closely related to Soya. In female sheep and goats, eating clover causes endometrial damage and cervical mucus changes associated with an inability to conceive. The problems are not unique to sheep and goats; fertility problems from plant oestrogen exposure have also been reported in birds, cows, horses, mice, cats, and dogs as well as humans. Scientists have identified estrogenic activity in more than 500 plants in the last fifty years. So as good aviculturalists we need to be aware of what we are feeding our birds. Soya is alleged to decrease fertility in both animals and humans. Studies have shown that males who consumed a high Soya-based diet had, on average, much lower sperm counts than males who had never eaten Soya products. The researchers concluded that the dietary intake of Soya and its isoflavones is inversely related to sperm
concentration. It has also been known to reduce the male sex-drive (traditionally,
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