Alimentation and light schedule severe Macaw

[Daminou]

Hi everyone.
I live with my severe Macaw since about 2 years and a half now and i was wondering about her light schedule and diet. I bought the book of Michael which is full of good advices and i wanted to ask if i do things right.
Except screaming for attention i don't have any problem with my parrot. I give her a 12/12 light and obscurity and for the diet she was free fed with vegetables and seeds and a few nuts since the beginning but i noticed that the advice of food management with the bird is the best i have ever had.
I wanted to have a bit more specific examples about the food for my bird because it is not a big Macaw and even her weight does not really correspond to the weight range. she is more 286g (when fed) when every info i have are giving between 300g and 400g. According to my vet she is in good health.
I'm changing her diet with a bit more P15 nutribird pellets and way less seeds that i keep for training. It was already not complicated to train her without food management before but now it becomes way more simple and fast.

[Pajarita]

Well, the problem with the 12L/12D schedule is that the birds produce sexual hormones all year round which is unhealthy for the bird and ends up been painful from overgrown gonads so I would urge you to do more research on this subject (avian photoperiodism, avian endocrine system and avian reproductive system).

I do not believe in free-feeding any type of high protein food or pellets. Parrots in the wild do not consume that much protein every single day of the year and pellets are the most unnatural food one can give a parrot with the exception of people food, of course. The bird you have (severe macaw), for example, breeds when the nut of the Spanish cedar comes out (the rest of the year they eat fruits, flowers, buds and some seed) and because these trees produce fruit at different times in different areas of South America (because of local climate conditions), you have the species actually breeding at different times depending on the region where they live -March to May in Colombia, February to April in Panama and September to December in Suriname- so care needs to be given to their protein consumption. But I would not worry about the weight UNLESS she 'feels' too skinny. Even parrots from the same species come in different sizes and just like you have short and skinny people, you also have short and skinny birds. It's mostly genes but food and exercise also have an effect. My birds are all on the skinny side (well, with the exception of the two new quakers that are overweight from not been able to fly) and they are all very healthy.

[Daminou]

Great.
So as I was saying, I am not free feeding anymore but I was scared about giving too much fruits because of sugar. Thank you very much for all the good advices and the time you spend helping all of us. I will rebalance her diet mainly on fruits and veggies and use the seeds only for foraging. I am not too scared about her weight. She is exercising a lot and have a lot of out of the cage time. I am also doing a lot of indoor flight recall and harness flying because before having a parrot I was doing falconry.
Thanks again for all the advices.

[Pajarita]

The 'do not feed too much fruit because it has too much sugar for parrots' has been everywhere for many years and, for the life of me, I do not know why! I even had an argument (over emails) with Dr. Harrison (the one that makes the pellets) about this. If you observe parrots feeding in the wild, you see that they not only eat a lot of fruit but that they do it every chance they get so why do avian vets say that one should ration fresh fruit (which is mostly water and fiber, anyway), I don't know. Dried or dehydrated fruit is another story because, in them, the sucrose is concentrated and nothing dry is good for them but fresh fruit? Now, I am not saying you should give them fruits and nothing else! I give them a portion of fruit that 'goes' with their size AND their species. For example, I give the caiques and the GCCs BIG pieces of fruit but the pois get a 'normal' portion.

Use pieces of nuts for training instead of seeds - not that seeds are bad per se because they are not but, if you have a choice as to what to use as your high value item, pick the one with more nutrition.