fuirt and vegless

[ruby1]

Hi i have a baby timneh she about 12 weeks but she will not entertain any fruit or veg, i have tried her with pellets but they are a no go as well, all she wants are seeds. I am wondering as she tends to eat more in the morning if i did not put any seed in and just put the fresh food in for an hour and then put the seed mix in after this. I do put a mix of crushed mineral block and cuttle fish in the seed and i have tried the fresh food with and without the mix. I just worrie that she is a seed junkie and i would like to see her eat more of a species suitable diet.

[casper]

When I brought my youngest grey home, he would only eat seed as well. I let him settle in for a couple of weeks then gradually started to add some pellets as well as Zupreem fruitblend to his seed dish. He started to choose these over his seed and a month later is on a pellet diet with a small amount of seed each day mainly given for treats.

 

As far as the veg/fruit goes, my three all get their fruit first thing in the morning before their pellets when they are at their hungriest! Your grey is only young and you may have to encourage her to eat! Try eating the foods in front of her so she will be curious then try to hand feed her if she wont eat out of the dish! Also offer fruits as treats, I use pomegranate seeds which is one of their fravourite fruits! Try offering foods in different ways, mashed, warm, cold, sliced. Mine like to be spoon fed sometimes for example if I feed mashed sweet potatoes!

Other members use Kabob sticks which you can buy and thread the fruit on making it a game while they are eating.

 

Keep trying, curiousity will get the better of her and hopefully she will be enjoying her fruits and veggies soon.

 

Caroline.<br><br>Post edited by: casper, at: 2008/11/05 12:59

[BaxtersMom]

Caroline has given you some excellent advice. Keep trying different ways and be persistant. My grey is a "seed junkie" too and it has been an ongoing battle for us but I am making progress with him. I have the best luck with him trying new things in the morning when he is hungriest and when I cook at dinner I will set some veggies aside for my flock. My birds do seem curious as to what I am eating at night:) Try different ways like Caroline said, cooked, raw, mashed. If you give your baby scrambled eggs or oatmeal, etc try sneaking some of these foods into that too. I have started giving fruits and veggies in the mornings and adding the seeds an hour or two later. Stay persistant and eventually she will find a couple things it likes.

[ruby1]

THanks for that i tried to be clever earlier i opened a monkey nut and put a peice of sugar snap pea in the pod in it, and yes she tried it. Tomorrow i will hold back on the seed and put pellets and fruit and veg in the morning i will also try this with my other birds as some of the conures will not eat fruit, i have seen some of the recipes in the cook book on the site. It is good to know that i am not the only one with a seed junkie thanks karen

[shelly_quin]

hi ruby..

 

i sympathise with you, adanna was a seed junkie when we first got her, the breeder gave them as a treat, and recommended we did the same. We have only ever given her them as a little treat, maybe about once every two weeks. Adanna would sit and eat all that up, and throw all the fresh fruit and veg away. We have a system with her just now that sorta works, we give her veggies for brekkie (sometimes soft boiled) aswell as kaytee exact chunky, and then in the evening she will get fruit.. Saying that she sometimes gets wise to what we do, and just throws the veg out, but when she does that she just gets veggies for dinner again.. Its a long hard slog trying to get them to eat the good things, but you will get there in the end

[she]

Hi At 12 weeks old your grey should not be too hard to wean on to new food.Just keep at it. Like Caroline sugested try various ways of offering the new food.Also let her see you eating your meal and offer some veg of yours.

[zandische]

12 weeks is definitely still young enough to get her to eat whatever you want her to

 

I brought Athena home at 12 weeks and she was partially weaned, still on 1 formula feeding a day. To wean her off of formula, I started mashing up pellets into a mush and spoonfeeding her that. It wasn't long before she was eating pellets exclusively for breakfast and dinner without having to be spoonfed. She only gets about 1/4 cup of seeds to "snack on" during the day.

 

Once I got her on the pellet mush, I started adding in other nutritional things like oats, barley, fruits, veggies etc. Most of these she would at least try because they were mixed in with the pellets, and over time she began to realize that most of them were also tasty! A couple of things I did:

 

- vary the foods on a daily basis. Pellets were always the base for her mush, but I'd rotate the types of veggies and grains I used so she never got a chance to like or dislike one particular kind.

- If she just wouldn't try something, I would eat some to show her it was ok. I'd also feed her from my mouth with certain things like carrots and apple slices where she could eat the end and not get near my saliva. This ALWAYS worked.

- I almost always let her eat from my plate. We usually eat a variety of foods, so she's always trying something new.

 

FYI, now when she sees "food" we're hard pressed to keep her from trying some. She loves to waddle across the counter to the "cooking" area by the stove to see what we're making and beg scraps. She is very easily persuaded if she knows there is food around, but it took a good 6 months or so of consistently doing the above things to convince her that different foods were ok!

[ruby1]

Thanks for all the advice it is brilliant i am going to carry on. Can anyone tell me roughly how many pellet should i give her.

[Carolyn]

Parrots have taste buds and in some ways are like small children - they will eat the most of what they like the best, which isn't going to be what's good for them. Although a high-quality, supplemented seed mix -may- actually be a fairly well-balanced diet if eaten in its entirety, it won't be after your little darling has finished picking out the parts it likes the best and dumping the rest on the floor.:evil:

 

Your parrot's diet should consist of a pellet BASE ( 60 - 75% pellets), vegetables, grains, legumes, fruits, other table foods (20 - 30%), and some seed. The greater the variety of foods you offer your parrot, the more likely it is that it will be able to meet its nutritional needs.

 

The problem that arises with seed is when people try to feed a seed mix all by itself, as the whole or great majority of the diet. It's not so bad for the small birds like canaries and budgies, whose seed mix consists mostly of the "good" seed like millet, but "parrot mix" is usually mostly sunflower and safflower seed, which are calcium deficient and very high in fat.

 

 

Carolyn & Mika

[Tycos_mom]

I have the same problem except with a 5 year old not a baby he love to shread hanging news paper so I hung a whole small stock of brocolli on a veggie scewer and hung it in his cage well the firs thing he did was attack it and break off a chunk and chewed it to bits. hopefully in time he will learn to like the taste of the different veggies that I'll hang there each day for him to shread I wish you luck with your baby.

[ruby1]

I am off to the supermarket this morning i will get some brocolli this morning and hang it up she seems to like monkey nuts alot are these of any value to our birds or are they just a polly filler.