Dunking food

[GreenWing]

I've read about it before, but it's a new thing with Tiki (as in the last week) in that she's "souping" her food in her water bowl. I saw her dunk a pumpkin seed today, and then promptly ate it. Her water gets changed frequently and her water dish gets washed often, so I am not too concerned about bacteria, but why do birds do this? Do they want mushy or softened food, or something?

[janetafloat]

I don't know about other birds but Alfie much prefers his food mushy - I have to grind up his Harrison's and make a soup with it & he likes veg cooked & mashed

[marie83]

I think my conures are/were just messy cuz they don't/didn't even eat what they dunked lol. I just moved the water dispenser further away from the food bowls and it solved the problem.

[Munchy]

Disney dunks his food all the time. He used to have a cage with a perch that gave him access to both food and water so we'd watch him side walk fast from the food dish to the water. We thought it was quite funny. But he has a new safer cage where his food and water are on opposite sides. He can no longer scoot and has to climb with one pellet in his mouth all the way from one side of his cage to the other. We keep thinking we should by round dowel type of thing and turn it into a perch that goes all the way across, but we haven't done that yet.

[cml]

I think my conures are/were just messy cuz they don't/didn't even eat what they dunked lol. I just moved the water dispenser further away from the food bowls and it solved the problem.

That didnt work at all for us, I moved the water bowls to the opposite side of the cage, yet they still climbed all the way over, mouths bursting full of pellets, to put it in the water. Thats why we changed over to bottles, which so far seems to work very well =)!

[marie83]

Glad to hear the conversion to bottles is going well. I tend to use dispensers and place them as high up on the opposite side of the cage as I can, just putting it on the other side didn't work as well but still reduced the dunking. It doesn't matter so much now as they get fed meals so Ollie doesn't tend to want to waste time dragging his pellets across the cage.