Rainbow, Myrtle & Cockatiels

[liz]

Retweet was sitting in poop. It was all under her and her tail.

[Pajarita]

Then she had diarrhea real bad, Liz. Please watch the others VERY carefully because you've been taking in new birds lately and they could have brought something with them...

[liz]

I have been spending a lot of time with them. All seem healthy and ornery. They take turns landing on my back so that I can't see who it is.

ANOTHER EGG and this time just laying in the middle of the floor. No one claims this one so I have no idea who is the perp.

It is time to retrain me.
I turn on their light at 10 am and feed them gloop and chop. I turn the light off at 6 pm and feed seed, steel cut oats and now bran flakes. They eat the oats and bran first and always have leftover seed so I know they don't go to bed hungry.
There is no nesting places left since the last nest. I am suspicious of Jackie but she has no mate.
What am I doing wrong?

[Wolf]

Well, Liz, you are being a little stingy with information aren't you? I don't know the lighting conditions of their bird room before you turn on their light, but I am currently feeding my birds around 8 am and at that time I feed fresh produce and gloop. I am feeding dinner around 5 to 5:30 pm and that is their seed mix.
Do you give them cuttlebones to eat? Do they use them?
I am not certain that feeding that much bran is a good idea. Birds may use it differently than other animals and I really only have experience with horses and bran where we use it to provide fiber so that they poop good and in rare cases to help rehydrate a horse who works very hard so that they are assured of having enough water and that is done by serving it sloppy wet. In any case it is never fed on a daily basis.

[liz]

Day light but not sunshine comes through their window in the morning.
It is dusk at 7 pm so they get some window light between the 6 pm when I turn off the light and the outside is dark.
They have cuddle bones but Gimpy is the only one using them.

[Wolf]

If Gimpy is the only one using them and there is no other source of calcium that they use then I would take a cuttlebone and put it in the blender and turn it into powder and sprinkle just a little on their soft foods at least three times a week while they are in breeding condition and laying eggs. Pajarita knows more and may have a different idea to supply them with this.

[liz]

Will do.
I will try anything. There won't be any babies but I just don't want a bird to go through what is not needed.

[Pajarita]

You need to turn off the light earlier and feed them dinner earlier (5 pm this time of the year). You need to eliminate the UV light from the ceiling fixture because it gives 'noon' light and you keep it on from 10 am to 6 pm which is not normal for natural light. You need to feed breakfast earlier (I am also doing it at around 8am this time of the year) because, by doing it so late, you are screwing up their natural biorhythms (they eat breakfast as soon as there is light and you are feeding them a couple of hours too late). Wheat bran is higher in protein than wheat kernels and, as they don't have to do anything to do with it but swallow, they end up eating even more protein than if they had to eat kernel by kernel. Oats are also quite high in protein and should not be fed in abundance unless they are cooked (as the water infuses the grains and makes them swell, they consume less of them because they 'take up more space' in the crop). I also don't know what kind of seed mix you are using and that makes a difference, too, when it comes to protein content (sunflowers? what kind?).

If the egg had a good shell and you are providing them with a D3 supplement as well as calcium rich food (like broccoli, almonds, etc), there is no need to worry about whether they are all eating the cuttlebone or not but you might want to put more of it in different spots because, for example, my tiels and budgies don't eat it if it's laying somewhere, they want it stuck between the bars of the cages next to a perch..

[liz]

I was adding oats and bran to lower the protein amount. Do I just give them the budgie food?

[Pajarita]

Yes, just give them the budgie food until next spring.