FEATURE


all the nutrients needed. There are many different brands available but all claim to provide a ‘complete’ diet. As it is a complete diet you eliminate the chance of your bird picking through his breakfast, eating selectively those foods that he likes and chucking out the healthier options. This is common practise for many birds, if you watch them when you put their food bowl into the cage they will swoop down on the nuts and sunflower seeds and ignore or toss on the floor their veggies. Offering a pellet diet gives you peace of mind that your bird is getting what they need from their diet. There are some criticisms of pellet diets though; that it’s boring and unnatural for the bird to eat the same


thing day in and day out, some birds refuse to eat the pellets and it can be difficult to convert them from a seed diet. In my opinion these criticisms can be overcome in most cases with a little thought, a lot of patience and some deviousness.


My own type of deviousness comes in the form of mixing everything together in one bowl. I’m a great believer in offering as wide a variety of foods as I can and if you mix everything together you can add new ingredients without causing suspicion, as the general mix looks the same. The largest proportion of our parrots’ diet consists of pellets with a much smaller amount of seed; we give fruit and vegetables daily, sometimes raw, other times cooked.


BIRD SCENE 27BIRD SCENE 07


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