The Proper Parrot Diet

By Barbara Lombardi

Just as an inadequate diet leads to nutritional and immune deficiencies in humans, a suboptimal diet can leave companion birds susceptible to infectious and noninfectious diseases.

Parrot Food

Many parrot owners limit the bird’s diet to seeds or a prepackaged food for birds, believing that the bird will eat the diet and receive sufficient nutrients from the diet. These assumptions are not necessarily true.

It is equally incorrect to allow the parrot a free choice of food over the course of a day. It can make it difficult to note whether the bird is eating. Anorexia in a bird may be doubly difficult to detect because any high-fat bird diet leads to a bird in apparently good shape, while the bird may be suffering from its nutritionally deficient diet.

When planning a diet for your parrot, you should remember the preferred diet of the Puerto Rican parrot. According to one definitive study, wild Puerto Rican parrots eat fruit, seeds, leaves, tree fruiting structure and bark, as well as canopy vines.

If you want to feed your parrot seeds, limit the seeds and nuts or parrot seed mix to 30% of his total intake. For the rest of the diet, you should provide: 20% vegetables, 20% fruits, and 30% a mixture of rice, grains and legumes. Be sure that you do not include avocado in the diet, because avocado is poisonous to small psittacine birds. You can substitute dairy products for some of the legumes, and you can substitute pelleted psittacine diet for some of the rice and grain mixture.

You should offer food to your parrot at regular intervals. Offer food two or three times per day, leaving the food available for one or two hours at each feeding. Be sure to remove the food for discarding or refrigeration at the end of the feeding period. This schedule will not only make it easy for you to note the quantity and type of food eaten, but it will also help you to bond with your bird.

Just as humans tend to eat one type of easily accessible food, such as hamburgers and fries, parrots often become enamored of one food. If your bird has developed a strong preference for a single food, you must expand the nutritional content of his diet to avoid a nutritional deficiency. Unsurprisingly, the difficulty of such a change correlates highly with the age of the parrot. You can win a young bird over to several new foods rather easily, but an older bird may have a deeply ingrained feeding habit to which he is firmly attached.

It is important to start on diet improvement by varying the diet. Start by adding one new food to the bird’s usual diet every other day. If he eats the new food as well as the old, you are on your way. If he ignores the new food, you can try slightly heating or cooling the food to make it more palatable. If the parrot shows no interest in the new food, you can switch to nonmeat baby food or cooked fruits or vegetables. After the bird accepts the soft food, you can start mixing in a little of the other new food.

To keep the bird’s interest in the new food, you should remove seeds during the introduction. If a parrot hasn’t eaten much of the new food, you can offer seeds by late afternoon so that the seeds will sustain him through the night. However, you should remove the seeds before bedtime so that the bird will not eat his fill before breakfast.

The parrot may be happy to take a new food from your hand, or he may be willing to imitate you as you eat the food. He is your pet, and your encouragement in enlarging his dietary selection will help a great deal. As your bird becomes accustomed to eating several foods, he becomes more willing to accept a nutritionally-complete diet.

About the Author:

After moving to Florida I decided to combine my love for writing with my knowledge of pets. For ten years I owned and operated a local pet sitting service and gained a wealth of information regarding pet care. In addition I have been an English teacher for several years as well as an aspiring writer. I recently completed a Masters Degree in Educational technology and I am looking forward to teaching college classes online. I am freelance writing and living happily in Florida with my husband and our Nikki, the most lovable golden retriever I know.

Article courtesy of Suite101.com.