how much of each food group per day for a senegal?

[jacquie]

So as mentioned before I am trying to healthfully plump up my skinny little feathered friend. She is up from 108 grams a few weeks ago to 114 grams on Sunday. I am weighing her Sundays and Thursdays to start getting a picture of how her weight fluctuates, etc.

Approximately how many teaspoons/tablespoons of the following foods should she be able to eat in a day? I want to get the right composition/combinations.

1. High potency pellets
2. ABBA 1200 mix (dried mix with seeds and other dried foods and vitamins)
3. Nutriberries
4. cooked grains (she likes brown rice, whole wheat couscous, quinoa and whole wheat toast bits so far)
5. protein (she likes scrambled eggs)
6. Fresh fruits and veggies.

I think i am offering her too much in her dishes since I seem to be throwing most of it out each day.
Thanks again for a replies.

[Michael]

If you want to fatten her up, I'd get rid of everything but pellets. Maybe some nuts/seeds. For 3 months I'd go 90% pellets, 5% nuts, 5% seeds. The nuts/seeds are out of cage as treats.

The quantity doesn't matter as much. Just provide unlimited pellets. However, 114g for a female Senegal Parrot isn't terribly unhealthy. Kind of depends if you're measuring at full (right after eating or empty). But 114g as an empty weight seems on the low side of normal to me.

[jacquie]

Ya. I weigh her mid afternoon, so I suppose she would have some food in her crop since she's had some hours to graze from her dishes in the cage. It isn't so much her weight as much as the bones sticking out of her. She is small too at about 7-8 inches long, so I don't expect her to gain too much weight. I just want her to get to the point where her breast bone isn't sticking out.

I've been trying to get her used to eating pellets. She was only eating parrot seed mix at her last home. I'm giving her one dish with straight pellets and then I am hiding them in her warm foods too. I'm going to try moistening the pellets because she seems to be crushing and dropping them more than eating them. I'm sure she eats a percentage though.

I've been giving her a small dish of pellets and the ABBA1200 mix all day in her cage (I vary the locations I hang them, so she has to move around the cage to get to them). Then I've been giving her a warm breakfast of cooked quinoa with a bit of fruit puree and ABBA92 weanling porrage mixed into it. At dinner I give her some cooked grain but with a higher concetration of diced veggies in it instead of fruit.

[Michael]

At dinner I give her some cooked grain but with a higher concetration of diced veggies in it instead of fruit.

This may be the problem. Fruits and veggies are for diluting overly rich/filling pellet diet rather than the other way around. I feed my parrots veggies when I want their weight to go down, not up. Veggies are fun for them but they have a lot more water, less concentrated nutrition, and fruits have more sugar. My parrots get fattest when they have unlimited pellets for a while.

[lwis]

I would caution against feeding only pellets for any extended period of time. Pellets are like vitamins in the sense that they have concentrated amounts of all the nutrients that your parrot needs, but whether or not those nutrients are assimilated properly in your birds body is up for debate, not to mention, it would be just plain boring after a while- no different textures, flavours, or colours (unless they're the artificially coloured pellets). Some vitamins are water soluble and some are fat soluble, if you provide a variety of foods that contain both fat and water, the likelihood of proper nutrient assimilation increases. However, if you are concerned with weight and are not wanting to dilute your birds nutrition too much, just use fresh fruits and veggies that have a lower water content. Adding soaked, cooked beans can help add, fat protein and important minerals and vitamins too. I feed my bird meals with at least 15 different foods in them (including pellets) and he loves it! Of course, if your bird is not used to eating this way, it is probably best to ease him on to different foods. A bit of weight loss and/ or gain would be expected if your diet completely changed, But obviously it is best to monitor it more closely during this time. if your bird's weight levels out once he has been converted fully to a different diet, and it weighs slightly less than he did before, this may not necessarily be a bad thing, perhaps he was slightly overweight before?
Oh, to answer your question more directly, and of course this is just my opinion,
I would suggest feeding your bird the same amount of food he was getting before. So if he was being fed a big bowl of seeds, feed the same amount, just replace half of the seeds with a combination of fresh fruits and veggies, beans, grains, and pellets. after a little while start to decrease the amount of seed and then decrease the amount of overall food until you are feeding him just what he needs to eat. But if he is still underweight, don't rush decreasing his food amount too much.
Good luck with your little guy!

[lwis]

Little girl, pardon me.

[jacquie]

Thank you Michael and Iwis. I will try some sort of combination of both your suggestions. I'll keep working on cutting the seed mix out to replace only with pellets. I'll keep giving her 2 of the nutriberries each day as a treat since there are seeds and nuts in there. I'll give her some warm, cooked foods for breakfast only and just the pellets (the aren't the dyed ones) with a tiny sprinkle of unsweetened apple juice to change the flavour for the evening meal.

By the way, I suspect the higher weight reading at 112-114 grams that I got was because she had food in her. She is weighing more consistently at 108-109 grams.

bye for now,

Jacquie
PS: Iwis - love Victoria. It's a great city to live in. If it wasn't for the excessively expensive ferry, I'd live there in a minute. I have a long time friend who lives there.

[lwis]

Oh, another thing you could do if she really likes seeds is to sprout them. Sprouting seeds, nuts, and beans converts many of the fats into more usable forms of energy that is lower in fat. It also activates several vitamins and enzymes in the seeds that help to make food more digestible. Unsprouted seeds are dormant and do not have a lot of life in them. Sprouting them activates the life in them, and creates all sorts of neat changes in the seed that make it into a nutritionally superior food over it's previously less lively self. I sprout al lot of the grains and beans that I eat and have started doing it for my bird and he really enjoys it! sprouting takes a few days, but this way you don't have to throw out a bunch of seed. I still would only feed her a small amount of them though.

P.S. - Victoria is very nice, and yes the ferry prices are horrendous. Sometimes I feel stuck here. But then I guess it's not the worst place to get stuck.