switching to foraging toys

[lwis]

I will be getting a 5 month old green cheek conure this Friday. I plan on feeding him primarily by using foraging toys to keep him busy during the day. The rest of his food will come from us giving him treats or cooked foods(veggies and rice or pasta) when we are home. He is used to having his food available for him in a dish. Should I Keep the food dish in his cage for a while and slowly introduce him to the foraging toys and bowls, then slowly lessen his access to a free food dish until it is eventually completely replaced by foraging toys?
Also, if I am going to eventually replace his all-you-can-eat food dish with foraging toys, how much food should I be giving him per day?? I was thinking of possibly using a few hanging foraging toys that are a little more challenging and then also having a foraging bowl that would be filled with all sorts of things like pellets, seeds, dried fruits, fresh veggies, and also non-edibles like wooden beads or shapes and shredded paper. That way, he would still have access to a bunch of food, but it wouldn't be quite as easy as a bowl filled only with food.
Does this sound like it would work?

Thank You.

[laducockatiel]

It's a great idea to make him forage for his food! As well as his toys, I think you should feed him 2 (or at absolute minimum, 1) meals, in his food bowl in case he is havng a bad day and doesn't want to forage for his food.

[Cage Cleaner]

Difficult. You want no more than 10% non-pellet food ingested in the bird's diet. It's difficult to regulate this when all your'e going to provide is foraging toys.

When given the option to forage for food, birds tend to pick and choose, tossing out what they'd rather not eat in favor of what they would rather eat. This is the case when you make it clear that they only need to keep looking for what htey would like to eat. This also leads to birds just eating seeds and tossing to the cage floor pellets and other less desirable food.

However, if you make finding food few and far in between, then you may have a better chance of forcing the bird to actaully eat what it finds, each and every time. But with this scenario you run the risk of starving the bird.

[lwis]

Even if I gave him a a dish filled with a mix of seed and pellets (which is what he is getting now), would he not still have the choice to pick and choose what he is eating? I am a little confused by this.
I plan on still offering him a dish with the same food that he is getting now, just with other non-food things in it so he would have to look a tiny bit harder for the food. I am not sure how this would be much different form just giving him a food dish, as far as him being able to be picky and only eat seed vs pellets.

[Cage Cleaner]

Perhaps I misread, but my impress was that you did say you planned to only use foraging toys.

But, it hardly matters, because even if you were going to offer foraging as well as a free-feeding bowl, my suggestion would actually still be to not mix your pellets and seeds, and to instead fully convert to pellets. If you mix pellets and seeds, you are correct in saying that he will still pick out what he wants to eat and ignore what he doesn't want to eat. Which is what we do not want, because if he is a normal bird, he will go for seeds over pellets.

Seeds are an outdated bird diet, and are not balanced for what we now know of bird nutritional requirements.

When my Sun Conure came to me, she was on a fully seed diet. Her beak was peeling, and she had one toe that was misaligned. After switching her onto a pelleted organic diet (Harrion's), her beak now looks completely normal and shiny, and her toe is getting better.

Although others do mix seeds and pellets when converting, I do not. I put them in separate bowls at different heights. Pellets higher, and seeds lower, removing the seed after only offering it for 2 sittings a day, morning and evening. Offer the pellets full time, in a fixed location, preferably where the bowl was originally located in the first place.

[lwis]

I see. Thank you for explaining that to me. I was told by the person I bought him from to mix the seed and pellets, but if the bird prefers the seeds over pellets I could see how his diet would become unbalanced quite quickly.
With that in mind, I think maybe that I will offer him the foraging dish, which will have only pellets and non-food items like the ones I had mentioned, and then offer more difficult foraging toys will only have the 'treats' in them, like fruits, veggies, and some seeds and possibly some pellets too if he really likes the toys. So the most easily accessible food will be his pellets and the less accessible food will be the treats. That way he still has to work a little bit for all of his food, but it will be way more simple for him to get the pellets, which, I am guessing, would make it more likely that he would eat more of the pellets.
Does this sound fair?

[cml]

Foraging toys are great, they give a bird something to do and keeps them from getting bored.
Stitch always has access to his regular feeding bowl with pellets, and we hide pellets in most of his foraging toys (he loves to look for food so he usually eats his this way first until he's emptied the toys), and in 1 toy, at random, I hide a couple of nuts.

This works well during the days, he eats mainly pellets, has something to do, and is looking forward to finding his nut. In the evenings he gets fruit or vegtable mixes a few times a week. We dont give him seeds at all for his diet, he only get them for training treats!

[lwis]

Thanks! Only using seeds as a training treat is a good idea. I might do that too.