New Conure owner--need help PLEASE!!!

[beakycheekie]

Thank you Wolf! That's awesome. I was just curious and I may try to transition my budgies. I'm not sure about the cockatiels, they are both 15 and have been eating seeds their whole lives (I adopted them when they were already elderly, so I have been reluctant to ever try to change their diet. I don't want to stress them out!). Thanks!

[Wolf]

All the more reason to change their diet for the better, in my opinion. It does not need to be done quickly as, like you, I would not want to stress their system unduly. Both budgies and cockatiels naturally eat a lot more seeds than most other species of parrots, but I still can't help but to think that, even now, a better diet would translate into better health and maybe a longer life. No one actually knows how long any of our parrots could live with the right conditions.

Do your cockatiels and budgies already eat any fresh produce along with their seeds?


The cockatiel's lifespan in captivity is generally given as 16 to 25 years, though it is sometimes given as short as 10 to 15 years, and there are reports of cockatiels living as long as 32 years, the oldest confirmed specimen reported being 36 years old.

[Pajarita]

I have transitioned more than 40 budgies and, at least, 60 cockatiels to gloop, one of them at 19 years of age and with liver damage so severe from an all seed diet that the avian vet told me he needed to be put down because he was not going to last two months (he lived almost two more years on gloop and liver supplements) . They are actually much easier to transition than the larger species because they are natural granivores so the whole grains are exactly what nature intended for them to eat. Just put a white paper plate at the bottom of the cage (they are partial ground foragers in the wild so they instinctually go down to ground to eat) with the cooked grains mixed with the tiniest amount of seed and you'll see. All of mine LOVED the gloop with a passion - so much so that they couldn't even wait for me to put it down, they were already flying down and perching on the edges of the plate before I could lay it down

[beakycheekie]

Wow, Wolf and Pajarita that is amazing! I love my cockatiels SO much. They are so sweet and gentle. My hen is absolutely the most precious creature. She was surrendered at the shelter as an elderly bird because her owners were moving and they said that she had "no interest" in people anymore. I don't know what they were talking about. She asks for scritches all the time and adores attention. Anyway, I love my 'tiels.
Wolf, neither my 'keets nor the 'tiels will eat anything besides the seeds but I never knew about "gloop" or "chop" or how to transition birds to anything until I joined this awesome forum! All I did before was offer a piece of fruit one or two times, figure they didn't like it and give up. I've learned so much from you guys, thank you so much!!

Anybody else good at one-handed typing? *Sigh* parrot people problems

[Wolf]

Even with two hands, I am a slow typer, and since I usually end up trying to type with more than one bird on me I really end up putting them on top of their cages so that I can type at all. I also do a lot of my typing by just the light of the screen while my birds are sleeping.

I know that budgies are not into fruit very much although sometimes mine will try a little bit, but they do like vegetables especially romaine hearts and other leaf lettuces and I really do not expect that cockatiels to be much different in this regard.

Given the age of your cockateils, it is very likely that a seed diet is all that they have ever known, that is what was feed to all parrots back then and then we learned that this was not a good thing for them. Fifteen years ago that was all we knew and although we have since learned that this is a poor diet, in many places it is still how things are done.

There is a time in the lives of our birds right about the same time as they fledge and are leaving the nest that they are taught what foods to eat and how to find the food by their parent birds, that captive raised birds often miss. This is a part of their natural weaning process and many breeders still quick wean their birds to only seeds, ignoring the fact that they need to be allowed to wean themselves while being taught to eat a large variety of fresh raw produce as they are naturally predisposed to learn about foods at this time of their lives and then the new owners when the bird is sold are not informed about this or that they even need to do this with the bird. It becomes a missed opportunity. This is the primary reason that so many birds don't recognize most of the fruits and vegetables that they should be eating as food. And this makes it much harder to teach them what to eat. It rarely has anything to do with their liking or disliking the food, they just don't recognized it as food.

The best way that I know of to teach them to eat their fruits and vegetables is to eat it in front of them without offering them any of it. This is taken from the way that the parent birds would have taught them what to eat and it is also tied into the eating habits of the adult bird eating with its flock which is both a social and a bonding activity for parrots.

While I say to eat the food in front of them without offering them any of it there is much more going on than just that as the desired result is for them to learn that the food item is indeed food as well as for them to learn that it is very good food, they learn this from you by the fact that you are not offering to share it with them. As they are watching you eat this food, you should be making happy noises that confirm to them that this is very good food. At first they will just watch you and then they will begin to ask for a piece of the food, do not share with them. Then they will begin to beg you for a bite, again, do not give them any of the food. Next they will demand that you give them some of your special food and again you do not share with them. Once they reach the stage that they are demanding that you share with them, they will start getting more excited and you will need to appear to be careless and accidentally move the food in your hand just a little too close to them, you could also do this with the dish of food, allowing them to take the food away from you or to steal your special food.

There is no way to tell what they will do with the piece of food once they get it. They may throw it away or the may take a bite and spit it out and drop the rest of it or they might actually eat some or all of it. None of this is very important at this stage. What is important is that this begins to set it in their mind that this is food. You may need to repeat this process many times before they finally begin to eat the food, but if you keep on doing this they will eventually eat some of the food that is given in this manner.

Although I often start them out and end with a food that I know they like, I can't tell if it actually makes it any easier to get them to accept the new food as food. but I do think that it helps, I just don't have enough evidence to say for certain. With some of my birds it appears to help and with others it does not seem to matter very much at all.

I don't normally mix birds and mirrors for some very obvious reasons, but I think that I have finally found a use for them, at least for birds that are ground or partial ground feeders. This is to place a new food such as half cooked whole grains on the mirror on the bottom of their cage. They see another bird eyeing this new food in exactly the same way that they are eyeing the food and when they start to sample the new food that other bird also samples the new food. I have only read a little about this way of introducing a new food to the bids and have not yet given it a trial run.

[Pajarita]

Niether tiels nor budgies are big on fruits. I can count with the fingers of one hand the number of them that actually ate some! But they LOVE greens with a passion and they do like veggies as long as the veggie is either small or chopped up (mine all the veggies in the gloop: corn, diced carrots, peas, chopped broccoli, baked sweet potato, hominy corn, diced butternut squash and chopped artichoke hearts - the only thing they left behind were the chopped green beans) but they ADORE corn on the cob (the fresh one barely cooked -2 minutes only -in a pinch, you can use the frozen kind but don't cook it, just allow it to thaw naturally, they don't like it as much but they will make do with it) and greens -for the budgies, use two leaves, both dripping with water (and I do mean DRIPPING!), put one up on top stuck between the bars and one laying down on the bottom of the cage (they like to take 'baths' on them).