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Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

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Re: Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

Postby vchip1970 » Thu Oct 20, 2016 2:26 pm

Well I just read that then copied it and pasted into word and printed it... LOL! Pajarita, I didn't take your first post negatively at all. I only want what's best for Oscar and I haven't been doing what's best because I certainly have been feeding him too much Protein for sure. Also too much dry food.. That Damn Bountiful Harvest stuff was so expensive (20lb bag), :( All your advice is amazing, I will cut the proteins and whole grains down and stick to more of a produce diet like you suggest. I am still going to to use Laurella's site because its a good quick reference for safe produce when shopping. Also I will get rid of the coconut oil and look for the rice recommendation.
Thanks again for yours and Wolf's help. Great stuff and eye opening. Sometimes we get so caught up in this stuff and grab at and interpret things wrong or even veer off in a direction that might not be in the best interest for the bird. But almost everything I have been doing I collected in my mind as the right way of doing it because I want to do it right. Thank you and thank you Wolf!
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Re: Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

Postby Fie » Thu Oct 20, 2016 10:21 pm

Wow really interesting post there Pajarita :thumbsup: thanks for that!!
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Re: Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

Postby Pajarita » Fri Oct 21, 2016 12:01 pm

Let me give you a couple more pointers:
1) Don't ever take anything anybody says as the gospel - do your own research but go to scientific sources because, if you go by what people say or do, you might be steer in the wrong direction. Everybody tries to do what's best but because bird husbandry has changed SOOOO much in the last 15 or 20 years, you still find obsolete information out there as if it was still good - like feeding animal protein to herbivores, for example! Nobody would think of feeding hamburgers to a horse but people don't think twice about feeding eggs to birds that never consume eggs in their natural habitat - see what I mean? There is a reason why we used to feed eggs and even meat to birds and it was because, knowing nothing about the relationship between calcium absorption, vit D3 and sun exposure, we did not know why our indoor birds will develop a calcium deficiency but what we did notice was that, when we fed animal protein to them, the hens did not become eggbound (vit D3, essential for calcium absorption, is only found in animal protein, never in any kind of vegetal material) so we thought it was a good thing we were doing!
2) Never stop doing research - our knowledge of bird husbandry, pathology and treatments are in their infancy and continuously improving so it pays to keep up.
3) and this is just a personal recommendation: with birds, most often, less is better than more. We have developed this mentality that more is better: more vitamins, more nutrition, more everything but, when you are dealing with an undomesticated animal, you need to take into consideration what nature decreed was the right balance and, almost always, it's less than we think is good. I'll give you an example that happened to me: I once took in a female Northern Cardinal from a lady in Manhattan - this bird had something that looked like plastic, translucid, brownish 'wing's growing out to the sides of both her legs (and I am talking a good inch and a half wide!). She did not know what these were and neither did I or my avian vet. My AV went to a veterinarian sharing site where vets would post questions or doubts so as to be helped by other vets that might have had a prior experience but nobody knew what these things were UNTIL a zoo vet told her that they were caused by an extreme case of hyperkeratosis! This is basically the body producing too much keratin (the protein that feathers, nails and scales are made of) all the time. The lady had read that these birds were insectivores and had fed the bird worms year round for years BUT these birds are what is called herbivore/insectivore, their diet is 90% insects and 10% vegetal material during breeding season but it changes to 90% vegetal/10% insects during the rest of the year so, when she fed her worms all the time (thinking that it was better to do this), she messed up this bird's liver to the point that she no longer metabolized protein correctly. It took me over two years of treatment to get her to a point where she no longer overproduced keratin but her liver was damaged for good and she could not be released back into the wild (I found her a wonderful rehabber who had a huge outdoor aviary for species that needed wintering and could not be released). This holds true for lots of nutritional values -vitamins like D3 and A and minerals like calcium and iron, for example, are very iffy because if you feed too much, you are really screwing up the bird.
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Re: Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

Postby Wolf » Sat Oct 22, 2016 7:22 am

Actually, I think that I was the one who was most concerned that you might have taken what Pajarita shared with you in a more negative manner due mostly to your question of was there anything that you were doing right by your bird. I did not want a misunderstanding of how her information was being offered if it could be avoided.
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Re: Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

Postby Fie » Sat Oct 22, 2016 2:32 pm

How do you find good scientific sources though? Whenever I go on google I just find the same sites which I know of by heart now.

A rule of thumb that I often use when in doubt is "would a bird in the wild have access to this food?"... would he have access to chicken? nope. would he have access to cooked rice? nope. :D
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Re: Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

Postby liz » Sun Oct 23, 2016 6:47 am

I just wrote a long post and lost it.

Since there are many things in the wild that they can eat that we don't even know we supplement their diet with legal human foods.
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Re: Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

Postby Pajarita » Sun Oct 23, 2016 11:37 am

Well, I tell you, it takes a lot of practice to teach yourself to do good research. But you can always start with, for example, going to several sites that give you diet information in general (places like Wikipedia, The World Parrot Trust, etc.) and see, exactly WHERE they come from and what are the native plants they feed on. I had a little list saved from way back when I had ekkies and got the below info from somewhere: Pandanus (screw pine), nonda plum, red beech, grewia papuana burret, mackinlaya, pirrungu, hopbrush, micromelum minutum, dissilaria laxivernis, brittlewood, nasturtium tree, zyzygium bamagenese, sarsaparilla tree, solitaire/livistona/dicksonia palms,  small-leaved fire vine, crepe myrtle and cinnamonwood tree. Then you look up each plant and try to find out what kind of nutrition they would get from it.

But, saying something like 'parrots don't eat cooked rice in the wild' doesn't really signify and I'll tell you why. The truth of the matter is that, unless you not only live in the same country where the bird comes from but also in an area where the flora has been completely unchanged by civilization, you won't be able to feed the bird its natural diet. So, the only solution is to get an accurate idea of what the basic nutritional parameters are and try to stay within the ranges as much as possible. This is a problem because we really do not have an idea of what most species basic nutritional parameters are and, if we did, we would also need to know in which season this parameters are valid because, for example, we know that amazons feed on a maximum of 17% protein BUT only during breeding season when they are feeding their babies PLUS these are birds that are exposed to the elements, which need to fly miles to find enough food, which might get 17% one day but only 12% the next, etc. Because, that's another kicker with birds: there isn't a single one that actually gets a complete balanced meal every day! NONE! Birds often go to sleep hungry during the resting season and, even during the spring or dry season or whatever the plant growing season is called in their part of the world, they don't eat a bit of this and a bit of that so as to ensure they are getting a balanced meal. Nope! Birds find, say, a fig tree and eat from it until all the figs are gone -something that might take 2 or 3 days for a smallish flock so, during those three days, all they eat is figs! Because nature made it so the 'balance' in their nutrition is achieved through all these ups and downs in their feeding ecology. It's only man that thinks that eating a balanced meal every single time is the way to go - not Mother Nature.

Now, as to cooked grains been unnatural to birds - yes, they are. But then everything we feed them is unnatural so the concept behind cooking the grains is that it makes them more digestible (both in terms of complex carbs AND protein). I don't cook them all the way through, I leave them al dente (soft in the outside but still hard inside) - I've done a lot of research on this subject and I feel that this gives them the best of two worlds: the hardness and 'naturalness' of the grain along with the better digestibility through the cooking AND, let's not forget a VERY important 'side effect' of cooking grains: it infuses them with water, making the meal much more similar (in terms of moisture content) to what they would be eating in the wild! And this high water content is also great because you don't have to worry too much about feeding too many carbs as their crops get full with less carbs so, no matter how much gloop you feed, the bird never becomes overweight, a very common problem with pet birds that are free-fed pellets or seeds! People try to manage their weight by actually counting the number of pellets they feed the bird but I hate the idea of any of my birds been hungry, not finding any filling food to eat and having to wait until either their dinner or the next day... Feeding gloop is so much better for them and so much easier for me that I really don't see any benefit in switching -by the way, I've been feeding all my birds gloop for over 20 years now and they all do wonderfully on it: good blood work (even the ones that came to me with liver or kidney issues), good weight and, most importantly, they can eat as much as they want and they all love it!

A couple of links for you to read about this subject:

https://www.verywell.com/what-you-need- ... es-2242228

http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-coo ... d-2a.shtml
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Re: Hello From Oscar and his personal attendant.

Postby Fie » Thu Oct 27, 2016 5:33 pm

Sweet, thanks for the tips :thumbsup:
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