Well, if conflicting information bothers you, you'll have a real hard time researching anything about birds because pretty much all you find out there IS conflicting info
I have pretty much given up reading stuff other people write because it ends up being a bit of a waste of time. I go by nature, scientific studies, field biologists reports/papers/articles and when I find nothing to guide me, common sense and observation. And I've had plenty of opportunity for the observation part because I've had birds my entire life (there were already birds in my house when I was born and there was never a time when we didn't have any -my grandmother was a bird lover BIG TIME), I hand-fed my first parrot when I was ten years old (under my grandmother's supervision -I was born and raised in a South American country where there are parrots that are considered an agricultural pest so she would buy the babies sold in the flea markets, raise them without a cage and allowed to go back to the wild flocks if and when they wanted) and I took in my first rescue (a redlored zon) back in 1992 (I also ran a rescue for 6 years in Pennsylvania). I am also a bit of a know-it-all who hates being wrong so I make triple sure I know what I am talking about before I open my mouth (gotta make sure I win all the arguments with the husband
).
Yes, that article is not good at all. For one thing, as I explained, it's not a matter of simply covering the cage, the bird needs to be exposed to twilight for the thing to work flawlessly and, as we can't reproduce that different light with artificial bulbs, we have no choice but to follow the natural schedule of the sun. Also, not all birds breed with long days. Tropical birds breed at 12 hours of light because that's all the get in the tropics. And then you have birds that go into breeding condition when the days are short (like grays, senegals, IRNs, etc). It says that it's dangerous for birds to lay eggs but that doesn't make much sense taking into consideration that it is the ONLY way they have of keeping the species alive (Nature is not that stupid). And (and this is the clincher for me) it recommends Lupron injections and separating bonded birds! TERRIBLE advice! But I am going to tell you something that avian vets keep secret: they do not study avian nutrition or behavior - and, in truth, they shouldn't be giving advice on something they don't know enough about. They go to school for dogs, cats and large animals (which is mostly farm animals like horses, cows, etc - they hardly touch exotics in school), they do study to pass an exam that allows them to be certified in birds after they get their degree but they only study medical issues like pathology, diseases, conditions, treatment/meds, surgery, etc. I have three Avian Medicine text books and there is no chapter on behavior (NONE) and the one on nutrition is pitifully vague and general. People forget that Avian means all kinds of birds, not only parrots, and that birds have all kinds of dietary ecologies, some eat meat, some eat fish, some eat seeds, some eat insects, some eat nectar and pollen, some eat everything like pigeons, chickens and gulls, etc. Parrots, with the exception of two species and possible a third, are all classified as herbivores and that means NO animal protein so, please, no more egg supplement for yours (there isn't a single species of parrots that has eggs as part of their natural diet -and neither do finches, for that matter), it makes them hormonal (all that protein!) and it destroys their liver (hepatic lipidosis) and kidneys (high uric acid) because Nature doesn't give an animal the ability to either metabolize or get rid of something that the animal is never supposed to eat so all the bad cholesterol of animal protein goes straight to their circulatory system and stores in the liver. There is absolutely nothing a parrot eats in the wild that has bad cholesterol in it because, although there are species that do eat insects, insect meat has virtually no fat and no bad cholesterol. Also, please no parsley. It has, by far, the highest content in oxalic acid of all the veggies and giving it to a bird that wants to breed is actually very dangerous because it inhibits absorption of calcium which they need for the eggshell - without enough, the eggshell is very thin and flexible and they cannot push the egg out (eggbound!). I also do not feed collard greens or beet greens because of the same issue or spinach because of the high iron content (very bad for birds that require very little iron and, when given too much, ends up stored in the liver giving them hemochromatosis which has no cure for birds (humans get transfusions) and it's fatal. I also don't feed any dry anything - well, let me rephrase that, I do give them dry currants, dates, figs and raisins and, when I use things like dried apple or pineapple chips, I get the ones that are dried naturally and without any additives (papaya, mango, apricots, etc have sulfites added) and I reconstitute them overnight. Why? Because parrots natural diets have a water content of 85 to 95% and, because they are all prey, they are crepuscular and mostly canopy feeders so they only drink water once or twice a day and are not hard-wired to drink a lot of it. We've learned from the mistakes we made feeding cats that animals that are supposed to eat a wet diet end up with kidney problems if fed dry (I've know birds that have fainted from dehydration). A chronic subclinical dehydration added to high protein always ends up as kidney disease in parrots.
Nest: I use cardboard boxes which I change once they chew it up with holes (they don't like holes in them even though they like to make them
) but a nest box is better. They do not use nesting material so no shredded paper or anything. If it's a species that uses some sort of material at the bottom of the nest, they make it themselves by chewing the bottom of the box or tree cavity or whatever. The only species that carries nesting material back to their nest are the lovebirds and, in a much lesser scale, budgies. BUT do make sure your birds have enough calcium and vit D3 before you give them a box. And yes, once they get a nest they like (and this is the trick! they have to like the nest AND the location so you need to watch them and see what they do when you put it in their cage), they will leave everything else alone because they found what they have been looking for.
Diet: Yes again, lots and lots of conflicting information and even going to places where they list what the wild birds eat is not much help unless you dig deeper and deeper because they don't tell you what the proportion is of each type of food or when they eat it (birds are seasonal eaters so they don't eat the same things in spring as they do in the winter, summer or fall). What I have done (I started doing research on their natural diets when my first rescue was diagnosed with high uric acid back in 1994) and still do (I do two hours of research every day except Sundays) is look at different sites where they list their wild diet, then I go to the country's natural flora and do research on each species and type of plant, seed, fruit, etc they eat looking at the nutritional values (if I can find them! but I am lucky that I can read different languages) and when they bloom, fruit, etc and how long they last -this is because a list can say they eat, say, figs but figs last only a couple of weeks out of the year. Now, if you look at GCCs, where they come from, what kind of climate they have there, and what they eat doing research on each item listed there, you can get a pretty good idea of what it is that they eat in the wild. They eat a lot of fruits, other plant material like buds and such and seeds BUT just because it says seeds, it doesn't mean sunflower seeds or a huge quantity of them because most of the seeds they eat are what is called 'green seeds' which are the seeds inside the fruit or still on the grasses. Sugar is not a problem for them as long as it's the natural sugar found in fresh fruit (fructose). Also, the thing about parrots and what they eat and don't eat is that they are VERY altricial and need to learn everything from their parents but because no breeder really takes the time, energy or expense of weaning them to the right kind of food (if you breed them, you either don't know enough about them or you simply don't care), they need to learn when, in reality, it's after the fact - which makes it very hard and requires A LOT of work in our part. There are tricks you can use: right time (dawn because it's when they eat in the wild and when they are the hungriest), right presentation (this one varies from bird to bird), communal eating (you eat with them), etc but the most important is patience. It takes a looooong time to get them to eat a good diet - and when I say a loooong time I don't mean a month or two, it means years sometimes! I had a gray that took five years to try blueberries for the first time even though she got them once a week for the whole five years and she saw all the other birds eating them. Yes, it's a lot of wasted money but a parrot will not eat something it doesn't know what it is and their timetables are not like ours, everything takes a long time with them. But the other thing is that they cannot have any protein food available because, if they do, they will eat it until they are full and just take a bite or two of the healthy food. Why? Because nature gives animals a craving for food that has nutritional elements necessary for survival for the species but it's not easily available and, in the wild, there are no natural sources of high protein food that is available all the time or even in abundance. Parrots might eat, say, palm nuts which are high in protein, for example, but a palm doesn't produce nuts all year round. See what I mean?
Now, I do no feed any sunflower seeds to my GCCs and they don't have any type of protein food available to them during the day - only the healthy food. When the sun is going down (this time of the year, at 6:30 pm more or less, it depends on the day itself because, if it's a very grey day, they get it a bit earlier), they get a single tablespoon of budgie mix (mostly grass seeds like different types of millets, canary seed and a few safflowers) for both of them with pieces of nuts (yesterday they got three pieces each the size of a 1/8 walnut more or less - broke half a walnut in half and then halved it again) but only this time of the year and only until they are done with the molt. The rest of the year they only get budgie seed but I do up the portion a bit. My birds get their gloop in shallow little stainless steel dishes (like this one:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Van-Ness-Sta ... /111418784), the raw produce on a little wire platform they have which I cover with old magazines and the seed dinner on the bottom of the cage.