Hello from Leicester!

[Charl]

Hi everybody! I'm Charlotte from Leicester UK.

I've been studying Michael's techniques as well as others', visiting and talking to parrot people and reading everything I can for four years. This summer I finally got my first bird - Murray the cockatiel. She is female (I think!), her mutation is split to pied and she was born some time in April. She was given to me by a lady who hand reared her and was a little inexperienced, so Murray isn't the biggest glossiest tiel. In fact she was decidedly scruffy when I brought her home! A check up with my local avian vet assured me everything was fine, but she was going to need better nutrition than she had been getting. I now have her on a varied diet of pellets, seeds, nutriberries and of course veggies. She's doing great on it, and looks much healthier now even though she is halfway through her first molt!

I'm looking forward to chatting on this forum!
X

[Wolf]

I do hope that you are aware that you are feeding three high protein and high fat food to this bird and that is not good.

[Charl]

No, Wolf, I wasn't. Hi by the way! Where is the problem with her diet? What on earth else is there to feed a cockatiel?

[Pajarita]

My tiels eat gloop and greens for breakfast (the gloop has vegetables in it and although I do give them fresh fruit everyday, only one of them munches a bit on an apple and nothing else) and a budgie seed mix for dinner. You can't free-feed high protein to parrots, only to natural seed-eaters like finches or canaries. Tiels are partial ground foragers so they can 'stand' a bit more protein than other species but you still need to measure it or they end up in hepatic and renal failure when they age.

[Charl]

She has most if the ingredients for what you call gloop too as part of her veggie portion each day She has a bit of fruit in the morning, seeds and nutriberries most of the day, a main meal of veggies as well as brown rice/chia etc at tea time and a few pellets scattered on the desk while I work. Is it that I'm making the seeds and nutriberries available?

[Wolf]

Hi

Basically yes. Nutraberries, seed mixes and pellets are all formulated as a complete diet in themselves although their fat and protein content is way too high for parrots. The values that are used to formulate these products are derived from chicken formulas. I keep fresh fruit and vegetables available all day for my birds, however, for the most part parrots only eat in the morning and evening with the one major exception of high protein foods which are not particularly abundant in the wild and as they need this for breeding and raising their young they will gorge on it whenever they find it available.
Also, I have seen several of your responses to people on the forum and just wanted to say that I like the manner in which you respond to them and am working on improving in this area myself, so thanks for a good example.

[marie83]

Hi there, its nice to have a neighbour on here

[Charl]

Well thank you very much Wolf! And thank you both for the advice. Perhaps I ought to adjust the ratios of her diet a bit then so I can get her eating more fresh food and less formulated products.

[Charl]

Always nice to meet a local Marie!

[marie83]

Indeedy, I've nothing against the other nationalities that use the board of course I haven't but the UKers are few and far between. I believe Jaydeparrot and myself are the only ones who post regularly/semi regularly these days but it's still a good place to be