Hello from North Texas

[Pajarita]

There is no 'if' when it comes to soft foods and young birds, they all need them, so, please, go get the ingredients and prepare it. Also, pellets should not be free-fed and you cannot feed just pellets and seeds, you'll kill the bird in a few years if that's all you feed. She needs produce both cooked and raw and cooked whole grains.

[modifieddesign]

Holy heck, this is already one of the rudest and presumptuous forums I have ever been part of.

No one asked me anything except do you have soft food? How about that the bird hasn't been on soft food since before I bought her? Or that I'm well aware of proper parrot diet as this isn't my first parrot. Roudybush is her staple item, various other things are also offered.

My wife is a naturalist and stay at home mom. She is constantly cooking with organic fresh veggies and fruits. The bird will be and has been getting plenty.

Do you people treat everyone as if they have done no research and are complete morons by default or just me?

Instant bad feeling with this forum. I thought it was going to be a friendly place about parrot training. So far it's just a place for pseudo experts to be snooty and look down on others.

The bird is fine. She is eating as I type this. Good lord. Fix the broken record. I heard you the first time.

[liz]

Rickey, there have been a few Newbies that come in and want to tell us what they are doing and seem to want to be praised for their good care when it is not. When they are told about lighting and diet they just brush it off as if they know it all.

I thought I was doing a good job with mine. I have a 20+ Amazon named Rambo that I rescued quite a few years ago. He never did fly. Following directions from Wolf and Pajarita he had his first good molt and grew flight feathers. He only flies about a foot off the floor but I can see how happy he is to do it.

Yes it is true that some of us are quite curt but keep in mind that you don't know what else is going on in our lives at that time.

[modifieddesign]

I understand. There a tons of people who jump in head first with animals and do no research. Parrots definitely suffer the most from that.

It's just frustrating to join a forum and no one ask you any questions just start insisting that you do something when they don't even know the back story and aren't asking.

This bird does not take formula and hasn't for a couple of weeks now. She was the last one to sell in the clutch and was the farthest along when sold due to that. She seriously eats just fine. Loves to eat in fact. If a problem shows up I have a local source for what I need so it's not an issue.

I want nothing but the best for her. People should ask more in depth questions before they start insisting on something. But I do appreciate everyone's concern.

[liz]

Concern is the word. This forum is like a neighbor hood and we all learn and are concerned about each others kids.
So many have come in and because they don't hear what they want to hear. They just never post again to answer questions. Then we wonder if the bird is okay or if it is being taken care of properly.
Those who are concerned and want to know more will ask the same thing that was asked in another post because they did not research and collect knowledge.
Hang in here for a while. You will get wrapped up in the events of the neighborhood.

[Wolf]

Perhaps, I am guilty of not asking a lot of questions, but in my defense I have not insisted on anything. All I have done was mention that parrots are often not weaned properly or sometimes regress and that you should be prepared for that possibility. So far that is all that I have said. So far you have not asked anything for me to need more information about so I haven't said more. I basically figured that you would eventually ask for advice and or share more about your bird when you were ready to. I always ask for information before I try to help with a problem, this is because I feel that parrots are very complicated beings and are affected by many things, so you have to start with background information if you hope to understand why a bird does a thing. You can be assured that unless you have already given enough information that I am not bashful when it is time to ask for information before I give any advice.

[Pajarita]

I'm sorry you feel this way but I am confused. You expected us to ask you questions? I don't know what kind of questions you expected us to ask you because, usually, people come here to ask the questions themselves. Sometimes, they just state the problem and, in those occasions, we do ask questions about their husbandry so we can figure out exactly what is going wrong and offer pointers to solve it but if there is no problem, we don't usually ask questions (maybe we are wrong on this but, honestly, I wouldn't know what to ask that would not just 'fluff').

I insisted on the soft food because this is something that 99.999% of people fail to offer to babies and juveniles (and people who've had parrots for years, too, as the soft food supplement is fairly new to parrot keeping) and, as you said you had no experience and then proceeded to prove my point when you said 'if' the bird needs it (when, in reality, they all do without exception), I thought to help your parrot by mentioning it again. It's like feeding a human toddler, you don't give it the same food adults eat, it might start off with the same ingredients but the preparation and care you put into it is different. As to a baby that has been commercially weaned, you will have to excuse me if I don't believe for one single second that it was done right. And the fact that the bird is eating pellets doesn't really mean that everything is OK, either. Let me share with you what I've learned about captive-bred commercial weaning in the 20+ years I've kept parrots: it's always done too fast and incompletely. The fact is that commercial breeders wean the babies way before it happens in nature because wild parent birds continue supplementing their feeding for months and months after they leave the nest - but breeders need to 'move' the 'inventory' fast and so they speed up the process. People do not want to buy an unweaned baby but they still want a very young baby in the erroneous belief that unless they get a baby, it won't bond with them - and so they sell them when they are a few weeks old and beginning to eat on their own because if they waited until they are 6 or 9 months old, they would not be able to sell them.

I don't breed parrots but I've ended up with babies in the birdroom (twice because I failed to find the nests of a budgie and a lovebird pair, and a couple of other times because the birds came with babies or already incubating -cockatiels) and, because I believe that stealing babies from parent birds is a cruel thing to do, I never pulled a single baby to handfeed so all I did was provide food that was plentiful and nutritious and observe them closely to see what they did and when. And what I saw was that the babies stay in the nest much longer than people think they need to and that the parents continued feeding the babies even when they were all fully fledged and eating on their own. Now, I don't know how old your Meyer's is but, usually, they are considered weaned at 10 to 12 week of age while lovebirds, for example, which are much smaller than a Meyer's (Meyer's are about 120 g while lovebirds are about 50), are still in the nest 12 weeks after birth and their parents continue feeding them for another 2 months and, as the larger the species, the longer it stays with its parents (with macaws feeding their young until they are 9 months old), it's pretty obvious that, at the very least (and I am been EXTREMELY generous) a Meyer's should take as long as a lovebird, right? So how can one explain that a 12 week old Meyer's is considered completely weaned when a lovebird, at less than half its size, still has another 8 weeks of parental supplementing? See where I'm coming from?

Parrots, same as people, are what they eat and, unfortunately for us and them, there are no good studies that we can use as to what is good and what is better to feed them (best been, of course, their natural diet) so we must do our own research. You feed Roudybush pellets and I am sure you are doing it because you think that these pellets must be good - after all, we have all these Dr. Roudybush studies on psittacine nutrition, right? But these studies were all VERY short term (11 months to a year before the birds were killed so they could look at their internal organs) and all done on tiels (which are partial ground foragers and granivores which not all parrots are) so, in reality, they are pretty useless because dietary issues don't ever come up in the short term, they are always long term.

Diet is one of those subjects that I take very seriously... mainly because I made many mistakes about it myself when I first started keeping parrots so I always try to inform people of what I've learned and that was what I was trying to do.

[modifieddesign]

Wow, and still it continues. Did you even read my post or just zone in on that one sentence? I said people should ask questions before they start answering questions I didn't ask that they have no frame of reference to answer. You offered advice I didn't request. I just said hi. Just introduced myself. That's it. And now we're to this point.

Also, what I said was I don't have the experience to chime in with my opinion. I didn't say I have no experience. This isn't my first parrot. What is your degree in? Biology of parrots? Please tell me why you're an expert on the subject other than opinion?

I mean the statistics just don't back you up. Thousands of parrots are sold yearly and weaned on this schedule and do great but you say it's wrong because parent birds feed longer. That's not a true scientific method. What about parent birds just offering food as long as the baby wants it and babies just taking easy food? There are other variables to consider. It's all opinion based.

I would recommend not quoting people unless you get it right, not answering unasked questions, and not assuming so much.

This forum really seems like a place I don't want to be part of. Was hoping for friendly people.

So once again, she was 100% off of soft baby food BEFORE I PURCHASED HER. She eats pellets with vigor and loves apple chunks. I'm currently working on teaching her to eat other fresh foods. Oh she also loves nutriberries. Everyone happy? Good.

Oh and hello to everyone, great meeting you.

[Wolf]

Ok, I see that some of us have gotten off on the wrong foot through misunderstanding, it isn't good but it does happen on occasion. Lets see if we can let this go and try again. Please don't judge the entire forum by your reaction to one or two people we are all different and don't all share the same point of view. The one thing that we all have is a very real love for our birds, to such an extent that we care for the well being of everyone else's birds as well as our own. We don't always agree, but we do try to understand that everyone does care and wishes only the best for all of the birds that we are aware of. Sometimes we just don't say thing just right to suit everyone, but what is new in that? Aren't we all adult enough to see past the discrepencies of how a person may speak that is different than what we are accustomed to and just take in any good information offered without being offended by its delivery? We don't have to take everything as a personal insult, I know that it was not intended as one. I know that it was offered as a means to help and in good will. Why does it have to be so difficult for us to understand that even if there are misunderstandings that the sharing of information in a place like this forum is all given in the hopes of improving the lives of all of our birds. I know that everytime I start to think that someone is just being a jerk that I have to think back not very far to see when someone else thought that same thought about me, when that was not even close to what I intended or wanted. We really can do better than this, so lets just do that.

[modifieddesign]

In my defense it was the repetitive mentioning of soft food, and the basic thread jacking that bothered me. Like I said, all I ever really said in my original post was hello. And then was greeted with a flood of post explaining things I didn't ask. Frustrating to say the least. I know everyone means well, but come on...a simple hello back would have sufficed.