Skeeter the Red Bellied Parrot

[seagoatdeb]

Red Bellys are all different, but the males are know for more stubbornly, deciding what is "theirs", but my female has been stubborn about that through her life as well. He is at breeding age now so this is the time of the biggest agression in Pois. My Redbelly, would get so mad at that age if she was prevented from doing what she wanted that she would look for someone she could bite. It was never me, but when she got too much that way, I timed her out, in a different room in a small cage. I would keep going to visit her in the time out cage, until she was not angry anymore and wold give me the tongue and beak "sign", that she was "over it.....lol.....That was the only period in her 17 year old life that she got that intense and stubborn.

[Wolf]

Could not read the first one as link not working, but read the second one and am not actually surprised that they see the food sources from the air. It is apparently another use for 3-D vision and with their ability to see inti the UV light ranges which gives them the ability to see much more colors than we can. I watch my parrots and I very often watch them pick nuts by sight. I can't see a difference in them but some of the nuts they will not even touch even when the lid of the nuts runs low so I guess they can see the quality of the individual nuts. It is an amazing ability even if it is not surprising to learn that they have it and use it this way.

[Pajarita]

Thanks for your thoughts, Wolf and Pajarita! It's been a busy couple of weeks so I forget to get back to this thread.

Wolf: Yeah, he could've been playing, but he seemed VERY earnest and deadly about it. Heh.

Pajarita: I've read that in the wild, smaller poicephalus species like Meyer's, Ruppels and Brown-headeds tend to eat a lot of high fat/protein rich arthropod larvae (much more than previously suspected), especially during breeding season.* That said, scrambled egg might have a different profile and Skeets is not a wild bird. I'll try to go easier on it.

*http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10336-013-0952-5
and http://www.jstor.org/stable/40665276

Yes, parrots often eat insects and larvae they find in fruit (cockatoos have been seen chewing up wood to get to the grubs inside) but, if you read the first one (Wolf, copy and paste the address and you will be able to get it), it states that they only eat them during the 10 weeks of breeding (the second one doesn't have anything about animal protein). I have started feeding insect protein to my parrots during breeding season but VERY sparingly because, in captivity, they always get much more protein and much more regularly than they do in the wild (the whole gist of the study was to figure out why Meyer's breeding season is during a time when there is no abundance of food and when most other species don't breed) . You also have to take into consideration that insect protein is not rich in fat, as you believe, but is actually quite low (except for the farmed meal worms which end up having much more fat than any insect out there in the wild because they are fed soy) and that it has no bad cholesterol to speak of - but eggs are very high in both and that is the reason why they are so dangerous to parrots. I would suggest you increase his protein by giving him safe sources like quinoa and hemp and, if you keep him at a low protein diet during the resting season as I do, a little bit of insect protein (I use freeze-dried mealworms added to the gloop once a week).