Msaad wrote:I want to add a thing, here in lebanon, the only food for parrots is those 2 mentioned earlier. christophe eats whatever I eat near him, he eats fruits and vegetables if I offer them. he feels lonely a lot bcz I'm always at uni and my parents are at work, but we all lovr him even my brother who give him snacks (bcz he is in the cage). I'm gonna start him a new diet, I'll see what I can find. talking to him is something that I do daily, but I'll give it more time. and I prefer on the forum two because we may get more advices.
Yes, it's the same in my country of birth: very limited commercial resources when it comes to pets food but, like Wolf said, you can make him food yourself. I don't feed mine any type of commercial food except for their seed mix dinner (my grays eat tw mixed combined: a cockatiel one with a few striped sunflowers, no black ones, and a small psittacine mix with no sunflowers but more safflower), I make their food myself. I buy whole grains (wheat, kamut, brown and black or red rice, oats, hulled barley and, sometimes quinoa, sometimes millet, sometimes teff, etc - you can add some cooked whole grain couscous to it, too), cook them, mix them with pulses (lentils and small white beans), some 'good' seeds (flax and sesame) and cooked and diced vegetables (corn, peas, carrots, green beans, broccoli, kale, sweet potatoes, hominy corn and one other ingredient which varies from batch to batch, could be yucca, could be artichoke hearts, could be palm hearts, could be beets, etc). This becomes the 'basic' mix which I split it into daily portions, put it in freezer baggies and freeze it. I think that, with one or a few birds, buying large portions and preparing it all at once so you can freeze daily portions works out best both for the pocket and in terms of saving work.
Why don't you try something like that? Now, at the beginning, you will have to offer just the grains without any vegetables because, as she is so used to eating seeds, she might reject them but, if you take away her seeds in the evening and mix a few of them with the grains in the morning, she will start eating them. Then, when you see her eating this, you start adding veggies to the mix, one by one and gradually until the mixture is half grains and pulses and half vegetables. For dinner, offer her a low protein seed mix like one for budgies or even canaries and one or two nuts (almonds, walnuts, etc).
But, my dear, she needs to come out for, at least, 2 hours a day so try to figure out a way where you can do this in a safe way and without your brother been around to get freaked out by it. Even the worst criminals have time out of their cell on a daily basis.
