Wet food?

[SuperSponge]

Maybe this is a silly question but does anyone else experience this?

My Senegal parrot ALWAYS dips her pellets in her water before eating them. She routinely softens her food in her bowl and it makes it impossible to keep her water clean. I've been thinking of changing her pellets for a while. Maybe she doesn't like them? I'm not sure.

Also, should I maybe think of getting her a water bottle instead? I was wondering if someone could gimmie a quick pros/cons of that. I didn't even realize until yesterday that water bottles were even an option!

Thanks again!

[notscaredtodance]

Some parrots will eat a bunch of pellets then drink a bunch of water. Some will dunk pellets to soften them. If she's eating them, dont try to change her diet. And since she likes wetting her pellets, I'd keep the bowl, because if she gets into the habit of stuffing pellets into the spout of the water bottle to wet them, it pretty much ruins the bottle with bacteria from having little pellet mush in the spout. and it's pretty hard to clean out. You could use two water bowls. One right by her food and one across the cage so that you might be able to get away with cleaning out the pellet water only once or twice a day, and the other water only once a day.

[SuperSponge]

Ah.

Well what we use are the colored Zupreem pellets, but I've been reading that the coloring is all just bad for them. That's why I was looking at other foods.

[Giantmoa]

my bird also likes her pellets wet. I got her a waterbottle and it works fine. She takes a pellet in her beak and treks across her cage to the waterbottle where she meticulously uses her tongue to get a little bit of water and mashes the pellet until it is a nice and crumbley. As long as I change her bottled water daily there is no problem but it all depends on the bird. I have heard of some birds plugging up the spout, etc. I mainly changed my bird to a water bottle because she pooped in her water all the time.

[Michael]

Both my parrots drink from a bottle so this isn't a problem. They go and eat their pellets first and then go to the other end of cage to drink from bottle.

[notscaredtodance]

They also have a lot of sugar and salt. My bird grew up with zupreem for a year and I've been trying to switch but its incredibly difficult. I've resorted to making her colored pellets treats for REALLY difficult training, like harness training, and actual tricks, rather than taming. And I give her a fresh diet of equal parts grains/legumes/veggies/fruits. So she's never been hungry enough to have been forced to eat the pellets I'm trying to give to her.

[lzver]

Both my Senegal and Red Belly dunk their pellets in their water from time to time. Sometimes they just want to soften them up I guess.

[SuperSponge]

They also have a lot of sugar and salt. .

See, that's what I've been reading. She's pretty healthy, so I don't know if it's worth forcing her to switch to the same thing, just colorless.

[Michael]

If your parrot is friendly and anything like mine (takes almost any food offered by hand) then you can hand feed a bunch of new (color free) pellets just so it gets accustomed to the taste. This is what I did for Truman for the first 2 weeks. That would be the only out of cage "treat" I'd feed him. The treat wasn't the flavor but the pleasure of being hand fed. Then when I switched him in the cage to just Roudybush, after a little hunger he just went right for it. I think the typical mix 50/50 old/new in food bowl method is the stupidest way to do it because as we know parrots are picky and will eat all the old and none of the new ones. So a better method is to force them to switch. First nicely by hand feeding and later not so nicely by denying access to the old ones. But luckily they should be used to them enough from all the hand feeding that they switch when hungry enough.

[Giantmoa]

just to add to that, I'd recomend a gram scale to weigh your bird when switching pellets, to make sure he/she is actually eating them.