by Pajarita » Thu Jun 20, 2019 9:21 am
I don't know who started the 'fruits have too much sugar for parrots' thing but it's bunk. Plain and simple and whoever said that fruits have too much sugar for them never observed parrots eating in the wild - that's for sure! Fruits are what parrots eat and conures are mainly fruit eaters. Yes, they also eat flower and leaf buds, leaves and seeds - but guess where the greatest majority of those seeds come from - from inside the fruits they eat! Because there is certainly not enough grass seeds to go around in the wild (grass being natural to prairies but these birds don't live in prairies or anywhere near). GCCs eat A LOT of fruit and, if I may make a suggestion, give him large chunky pieces of produce instead of the chop. To be honest, I never liked the idea of chop - it's such an unnatural thing to eat for an undomesticated species... It's funny because people is obssessed with foraging toys but then offer the bird food that is the opposite of what they evolved to eat. I do realize it's very practical for the owner but I don't make a single decision on my animals care based on my convenience but on what is best for them - and, for a conure that eats fruits off the trees in the wild, the most natural thing is to give it a nice, large chunk of whatever. Besides, if you use fresh produce for your chop and freeze it, you are not providing the best nutrition because fresh produce ain't it. It's frozen that has the most nutrition (I can elaborate on this, if you wish) which is what I use for gloop without allowing it to thaw until ready to serve - I mix the cooled cooked grains with the frozen produce, split it into daily portion, bag it and put the bags in the freezer until the night before when I take one out to thaw for the next morning breakfast accompanied by raw produce (because only raw provides the phytonutrients and good bacteria they need). For example, this morning, my GCCs got gloop flavored with ginger (a bit more than half a cup for both of them), five cherries, a chunk of yellow zucchini (I cut it lengthwise for them to expose the little immature seeds inside which is what they like the best) and a leaf of escarole. For dinner, they will get one heaping tablespoon of budgie seed with six pieces the size of a 1/8 of a medium size walnut (they don't get nuts during the winter, only during breeding season up until molt is almost done).
Now, the light schedule you have him on is not a solar one and I would urge you to do research on avian photoperiodism and the avian endocrine and reproductive systems because they need exposure to twilight for their internal clock and, if he is getting a 7:30 to 8 pm, he is not getting it. Let me explain. Birds endocrine system works based on the amount and quality of light their bodies are exposed to. The right exposure is so important that Nature gave them photoreceptors (the cells that react to light) not only in their eyes (as we and all mammals have) but also deep in their brain so, even when the bird is fast asleep, its body is registering if it's exposed to light or not. The length (daylight hours) of this exposure is what tells their bodies whether it's time to breed, to molt, to migrate, etc (photoperiodism coming from the greek photo, meaning light, and period as in what we call 'season'). BUT for their 'internal clock' (the one that marks their circadian and circannual cycles) to work, they need to be exposed to dawn and dusk because it is this different light that only happens then that turn it on or off. It's like a stopwatch - dawn turns it on and dusk turns it off, and the number of hours in between these two events tells their body what season of the year it is. When you prevent this exposure by having artificial lights on or the cage covered before the sun is all the way out on the sky in the am and after the sun reaches halfway down to the horizon in the pm, its endocrine system becomes confused and malfunctions not knowing when to stop producing sexual hormones. See, the thing with birds is that, unlike mammals, they don't produce sexual hormones all the time, only during breeding season. When the hours of daylight reach a certain number (predetermined by evolution that finetuned each species photorefractoriness point so they only produce offspring when it's the best time of the year for it), their sexual organs (gonads) become active and start producing sexual hormones. They grow in size and their body becomes ready for reproduction. When the number of daylight hours reaches another number, they stop, their gonads become dormant and shrink is size. But, when their endocrine system is screwed up, they produce them all the time, year after year, which does not only make the bird terribly sexually frustrated but also causes chronic physical discomfort and even pain (because the gonads keep on growing and end up pushing the other organs out of their place). This causes birds a lifetime of misery and ends up making the bird scream all the time, bite, pluck and even self-mutilate.
This is the best time of the year to get an endocrine system of a long day breeder (GCCs are long day breeders) back in tune with the seasons because we are almost at equinox when the night and day is of the same length and the days will start getting shorter.