Gloop, Chop, Mash, Help!

[beakycheekie]

Hello, I am wanting to get my budgies and cockatiel onto a more healthful diet. They are seed junkies that eat either a budgie or a 'tiel seed mixture and I know that their diet needs to be expanded on. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with the concepts behind gloop/chop/mash (I don't really understand the differences between them?) because it just seems like the options are limitless. I understand that both 'tiels and budgies are seed-eating ground foragers so a fresh-food diet may look different for them versus a fruit-eating conure or a macaw. Does anyone have any advice or recipes to suggest?
thanks in advance for any response!

[Wolf]

Let us see if I can at least help to simplify this a little bit. Gloop is basically a cooked food for your birds. My gloop consists of about 40% partly cooked whole grains, 40% fresh raw and/or thawed frozen mixed vegetables and 20% thoroughly cooked white beans and lentils.

I like Gloop because when it is given to my birds in the morning it has a longer period of time at room temperature that it is safe for my birds to eat. It is also considered to be a soft food, so new birds that regress or birds that were improperly weaned can and normally will eat it instead of using handfeeding formula so that they are able to get adequate nutrition. I also like that I can easily change the exact ingredients in it to utilize the better prices of what is in season or to vary their diet without losing the nutritional balance of the overall food. Nobody likes eating the same thing all of the time. It is also a great place to add their weekly dose of powdered bird vitamins and minerals that I use. I also give my birds a fresh raw fruit, vegetable and leafy green for their breakfast and for all day foraging. And then for their dinner I feed a good quality seed mix.

Chop and mast are really pretty much the same thing except for the mash has everything run through a blender. Both are great foods although they have a tendency to be a little light on protein which is aupplied by the white beans and lentils in the gloop. Complete protein is very hard to find in fruits and vegetables. The most likely source of protein in chop or mash would be with using sprouted whole grains. Unfortunatrly I have not worked out he ratios needed for a balanced nutrition with these two options, but recipes are easy to find. I don't use them because of the limited time that they are safe for my birds to eat especially in hot weather. I don't like mash because my birds do not like that it has no texture to it and no pieces that they can pick up and hold to eat. Other than this they are great foods as long as you add an avian vitamin/ mineral to the food at least weekly just like I do with the gloop.

We do have some members that like to feed chop and mash and sprouts and quite a variety of as unprocessed foods as they can and some of them are quite knowledgeable about the foods that they are feeding. It does not matter which foods you feed, you will always need to provide your parrot a variety of fresh raw foods a part of their diet, it has psychological benefits as well as the nutritional ones.

With budgies and cockatiels you really need to keep a good seed mix as part of their diet as they both eat a much larger amount of seeds in their natural diet than most other species of parrots. I am not positive about cockatiels but many budgies will not eat many fruits although you may have better luck feeding them berries for their fruit source than other fruits.

I don't know if this helps to simplify this or not, but I hope that it helps. We discuss diet quite a bit as it is a very important part of helping to keep out bird healthy and happier.

[beakycheekie]

Thank you Wolf, that does help! Diet has always seemed like such an overwhelming aspect of bird ownership, I end up feeling lost and just resorting to commercial seed mix.
Which brings up a question, I understand my birds still need a quality seed mix, but what qualifies as "quality"? Is there a difference between the $7.99 seed mix I can get at Walmart and the $25.00 bag I can order online from Amazon? Is there a brand that you or anyone else recommend?

The next question I have is about transition. I know it takes awhile for birds (being prey animals and creatures of habit) to adjust to new things. It especially sounds like diet is a very long-running process. My concern is starvation. How do I know my birds are not going to starve to death? I once tried to convert my budgies to pellets and after a couple of days they were sitting in the corner of the cage, quiet and fluffed up and not their usual chatty, hoppy selves. I freaked out and immediately gave them their seeds back. I later tried giving them a seed mix that had pellets mixed in with it but they just picked the seeds out and left the pellets in the bowl. They'd just wait for fresh food to be put in the bowl so they could pick out the seeds again.
I am really worried that I could starve my birds to death!
So, question 1: what constitutes a quality seed mix
and question 2: how do I know my birds won't starve to death
Thank you!

[Wolf]

I don't look at brands so much although some brands are known for using either cheaper inferior ingredients or for using better quality ingredients, but I have a hard time keeping up with all of that, so I read the ingredients listed on the bag or packaging that the food comes in. I do not feed pellets to any of my birds but with the seed mixes I look for a lower percentage of sunflower and safflower seeds as these are known to be higher in fats, I try to never feed a mix that contains soybeans or soy products and I try to avoid mixes that have long lists of things that I can't pronounce or don't know what is, these are usually chemical additives and preservatives and dyes which as a general rule are not good for my birds or for me if it were in my foods. A good quality seed mix should be just that, a mix of seeds without all of the additives. I do use a vitamin/ mineral supplement about once a week which I sprinkle of their gloop. I add one full daily dose but only do that once a week as it is just to make sure that they get the right balance of these nutrients and they get a good amount from the foods that I provide them with.

Pellets are often used now for many of the smaller birds, but for most of the time they have not been recommended for use with parrotlets, budgies or cockatiels and this was in a large part due to how dry pellets are. Some of these birds are from arid and semi arid areas( budgies & cockatiels) and due to this have evolved to consume even less water than most of the other species of parrots so that pellets could be responsible for a low level but chronic state of dehydration.

Changing your birds diet needs to be a long, gentle and slow process under normal conditions as any rapid changes causes stress in the body, just the same as it does with us. The first obstacle that most of us face when trying to give our friends a better diet is their age. Well it is not their age per se, it is that in the normal cycle of their life there is a specific time that they are geared to learn about food. This is when they first fledge and start going with their parent birds foraging for food. At this time the parent birds will set their young on a branch and bring them different foods and show it to them and get them to try it, the parents are teaching them what foods to eat and where and how to find it. At this time the parent birds are also still feeding them until they learn these things and are strong enough to eat it on their own and get enough nutrition from it.

We humans take these baby birds away from the parents during this time and give them a handfeeding formula and then wean them to seeds or pellets and then sell or otherwise send them off to a new home without letting the new people that they are taking on the role of the birds parents and need to start teaching them to eat a good variety of foods. So this stage in their development is often lost. This makes it take much longer for us to teach them to eat the variety of foods that they actually need to eat in order to be healthy. It does not prevent us from teaching them about this, it just makes it much harder to do.

You are the thing that will keep your birds from starving, you are their safeguard in this area. Let us say that the first change in their diet that you want to make is to start them eating gloop. To do this you should usually begin in the morning as after a good nights rest they are naturally at their hungriest and there is no reason for you to not use their natural processes to help improve their lives as it is easier that way. You would take and partly cook a mixture of say, 4 different whole grains,. It would be great to cook this the night before so that you can pull it and let it come up to room temperature and mix these grains with an equal amount of their seed mix and give this to them for breakfast. They will probably just eat the seeds for the first few days, but they will also start getting accustomed to the taste of the grains while picking out the seeds. They will begin to start eating some of the whole grains and then you begin to reduce the amount of seeds in this mix until there are no seeds in it and they are eating the grains. Then you begin to add in the vegetables one at a time until they are also eating the vegetable and then you add in another vegetable and so on, until they are eating their full gloop. Teaching them to eat their raw fresh vegetables that are also provided in addition to the gloop is done in a similar manner with the main difference being that before giving them their gloop in the mornings you fix some vegetables in the appropriate size for the bird and you sit and talk to the birds while eating some of the vegetables until they are demanding some of them and then you offer the one of the little pieces that you have with you for them. I can go into more depth about this process if you need it.

I hope that this answers your questions and will be useful to you.

[beakycheekie]

Ok, sounds good. Thank you! I'm sure I'll be asking more questions but this is a good starting point. Thanks again Wolf!!