Do not attempy

by **macbrush** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 6:23 am

My bird drop a lot of Harrison to the bottom of the cage, about half of it, I think it is a choice between turn into a dust in the food bowl, or crack and drop to the bottom of the cage. Birds simply waste food, full stop.

by **Zooey** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 9:41 am

I bake leftover pellet powder into a bread, cut it up, and freeze it in small squares. So you don't have to bake every day. My birds love it, and now I have to make yet another batch!

by **liz** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:08 am

My tiels get RoudyBush crumbles and the just put their heads in the bowl to eat. They even eat the powder in the bottom of the bowl.

I use small pellets for Myrtle and she eats hers the same way. The pellets are too small for her to pick up so she just keeps her face in the bowl.

Rambo won't touch the stuff.

Parrot Youtube Channel · by **Michael** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:21 am

Give them less and they'll eat the powder too!

by **GlassOnion** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 12:03 pm

I save the powder in a jar and bake bread with it once a substantial amount has been accumulated... Don't feed it to the fish, lmao!

by **Cage Cleaner** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 9:33 pm

by **Zooey** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 11:44 pm

I have a recipe. It's not very breadlike. Not fluffy or soft or anything. It doesn't smell the best, but my birds absolutely love it. Cut it up, freeze, and thaw it by microwaving on high for 40 seconds.

Birdie Bread
2cups whole wheat flour
2tsp baking power
½tsp baking soda
2eggs, crushed shells, wash before cracking or crushing
2tbsp vegetable oil
1cup pure fruit juice or water
Then you can add any of the following:
○pellets crumbled, powder, or whole
○seeds
○veggies, pureed
○fruits, pureed
○beans, well cooked
○whole wheat pasta, crumbled and cooked
○crushed eggshell
○dry oatmeal, crushed/crumbled
○calcium
○avian vitamins
Grease a 7” by 9” pan, or something around that size.  Wash eggs, crush shells, beat.  Mix
in oil and juice/ water.  Mix dry ingredients, then mix everything.  Mix extras together.  Mix
into the base.  Bake for 30 or so minutes at 350 degrees. Cool, cut, and freeze leftovers.

by **Cage Cleaner** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 3:01 am

by **Naurthon** » Fri Feb 03, 2012 10:36 am

I feed my birds Roudybush pellets and buy them a new ten pound bag every two months. I recently started being a lot more strict about the amount of food I give the birds. I don't just pour food in their bowl, I weigh it on the scale first. The birds are fed twice a day, with Maxwell and Nikko both getting 10g a feeding, and Dante getting 20g. This has cut down significantly on wasted food. Dante in particular is no longer throwing pellets all over the bird room, which is a definite plus.

Pellet powder is another thing. I actually saved all the powder from the last bag of pellets. At the end of two months, when the 10 pound bag ran out, I weighed the leftover powder and found that I had nearly 2 pounds of the stuff, so my waste is just under 20%. If I do all the math, it comes out to about 13 cents worth of wasted food every day.

I don't save the powder. It goes in an empty facial tissue box, which then gets tossed in the trash when it is full. While I really wish there was some kind of magic non-powdering pellet out there so there would be no waste, to me it isn't worth spending any time trying to recycle the powder to further reduce the waste. My time is worth much more than the value of the food I'd be saving.

Imagine that my time is worth $8.40 per hour. That makes it worth 14 cents a minute. At that rate, since my total daily waste value is only 13 cents, if I spend even one minute a day dealing with the waste, I'm actually spending more in the value of my time than I am saving in the value of my food waste. And that assumes that 100% of the powder is then later consumed by the birds in whatever form (bread or whatever) I feed it to them. From a strictly financial basis, there is no benefit from recycling the pellet powder.

Have I ever mentioned I'm a business data analyst by trade?