Budgie Owners, what do you feed your bird?

[pennyandthebrain]

I feel Ollie mixed seed with pellets and vitamins, as I wanted her to be only mostly pellets/fruit/veg but it didn't work out.

She sometimes nibbles on the pellets but if you don't mix them in with the seed she won't touch them.

She also gets fruit and vegetables and flings them around the cage.

[michellet]

We have 8 budgies...2 of them are companion/pet birds and live inside the house, and the other 6 live outside in a small patio aviary. They inside birds recieve a few more treats during training than the others but other than that they all have the same diet. I'm not a huge believer in the benefits of pellets (i know i'm not the norm here) and try not to use them very often. I prefer to attempt to replicate a "wild diet" as much as possible, and last time i looked i didnt see pellets on offer in the Australian bush. Our birds have dry seed (budgie mix) on offer all the time, sprouted seed offered once/day, fresh vegies once/day (e.g. sweet potato, spinach, brocolli, carrot, peas, red pepper, cucumber etc), corn on the cob twice/week, fruit twice/week (e.g. apple. mango, pear, orange, blueberries, raspberries etc) and every morning i go out to the garden and cut handfulls of long grass (i leave a small section unmowed just for this purpose) and the birds love forraging through it on the floor of the aviary. I also make a soaked/cooked bean mix and add boiled eggs (including the crushed shells), brown rice, a small amount of chopped mixed raw nuts, and chopped fresh vegies and feed this mix a few times a week...during breeding season and when the parrents are feeding chicks i add Passwells Parrot Soft Food, a high fat and protein mix, especially formulated for breeding parrots.

My GCC Missy also has basically the same diet, but i use a small parrot seed mix in place of the budgie mix. She also gets more nuts than the budgies as most things i've read say that conures consume more nuts in their natural diet.