6-10 years ago after I started seeing my pet’s current Veterinarian, I started to look into the ingredients in bird foods sold in stores & online. Before each bird’s first visit with the Vet, she would ask you to bring in the bag of food you were feeding & any treats. I would listen as she was going through the ingredients & honestly it got a little overwhelming as she is telling me that birds shouldn’t have this & that in the food. I thought I was feeding a high quality food & had done some research, but not a deep dive into what the ingredients actually are.
I ended up spending about 3 weeks researching what the ingredients in birds seed & pelleted food were. You may have heard pelleted food is better than seed diets, but pelleted bird foods are made from seeds, but contain a lot of sugars & dyes. I looked up every ingredient I didn’t know exactly what it was & I did this for every brand of food I could find online. There was only one company who makes an organic line that was close to healthy & without all the chemicals & salts others had, but this company’s food was very expensive & was sold in 5 lb bags, which would have lasted a week or two when I had 4-5 Amazons eating it. It also contained corn which has no real nutritional value & birds should only have a tiny bit & it was higher on the ingredient listing which means there is more in it. If you didn’t know the ingredients on packages are listed by the quantity in the package, most contained listed first & so on. In bird food the first 5-6 ingredients make up a good portion of the food that is in the bag.
Once I finished my research I wrote all the information out in a document that ended up being 10 pages long. I sent it to my Vet to have her read it & it made me feel proud when her only critiques were spacing & I forgot a side effect of one of the chemicals. My Vet is very thorough & very detailed, so I knew she would let me know if I was wrong, misguided or missing things. It is too long to put in a blog, but I will email it if you want to request it via email. I will include my blog email at the end of this post. My research shocked me & made me decide to find a way to make my own seed mix for my birds without chemicals, salts & other harmful ingredients. I was fostering birds at the time & wanted to change food for them as well. I will go into more information & the changes in the birds when I post the recipes for other birds in the future. I have to make a big disclaimer, if you feed a homemade seed diet you have to feed fresh foods at least 3 days a week or feed a High quality Vitamin A supplement. Manufactured diets add Vitamins (not all natural or good for the birds but most add some Vitamin A) & a homemade seed diet won’t have added supplements. I wrote about your bird getting enough Vitamin A in post # 59 & wrote about Vitamin Supplements for birds in post # 83. If you haven’t read these yet please do.
I looked online & decided ordering seeds was not going to be easy, most were salted & made for humans, meaning flavored or not raw, cooked, salted, shelled, etc… I then looked for local feed stores & natural grocery stores to see who carried what seeds. I was happy to find a local family owned feed store less than 10 minutes from my home & they carry the seeds I needed for my parrot’s seed mix. I buy the seeds by the pound & I use to mix it myself, but I am blessed that one of the owners will mix it for me. I bring it home & freeze it for about 3-5 days & then I add a few things as I am putting it into clean popcorn tins for storage. I freeze seeds prior to using because of the chance of seed moths, which can happen with manufactured (store bought)bird seed brands or seeds bought individually. Getting seed moths is not the end of the world, but they are hard to get rid of once they are in your home. They lay eggs & those hatch & so on & so on. So freezing helps prevent this from happening.
My seed recipe for my Amazon Parrots is as follows:
4 lbs Safflower seeds
2 lbs large Sunflower seeds
4 lbs Oat Gloats
4 lbs Red Millet
4 lbs White Millet
4 lbs Buckwheat
4 lbs Flaxseed
1-2 lbs Raw mixed nuts that I de-shell myself & break into 1/4 or quarters. I buy Walnuts, Almonds, Brazil nuts, Pecans, & Hazelnuts.
Sometimes I add in shredded raw organic coconut, Higgins Sunburst True Fruits dried exotic fruit (ingredients:papaya,pineapple,raisins,banana,coconut,dates,apricots,apples &cherries).
This recipe gives me approximately 4 large popcorn tins of food that lasts 3-4 months. I keep the little desiccant packets that come in quality pet treats & I place a few in the bottom of each tin to keep the food fresh & moisture from causing mold or mildew.
I hope if you are a parrot owner you have found this information helpful. If you have any questions about this post feel free to email me at echoinggreatpetcare@gmail.com I have other posts about bird care & you can find a list of my other posts on my home page under the show tab & then go back to the home page & scroll down till you see the posts you want to read(all numbered). I have had birds since approximately 1985 & have a lot of experience caring for a variety of birds from Finches to Macaws & many in-between. I currently have 2 Amazon parrots, 2 Cockatiels & plan to get another canary in the next few months. If you found this helpful please hit the “like button” at the bottom of post & consider sharing a comment about what you learned. If you have family or friends who are pet lovers please share the link with them via email or on your social media. All these things help my blog to be seen on search engines & more pet people will find my blog. Thank you for reading & please visit my site often, I usually post 3 times a week. Debbie
Echoing Great Pet Care 