by Pajarita » Wed Jun 10, 2020 10:41 am
Birds that eat insects are not omnivores - this is a VERY common misconception and one of the arguments people use to justify feeding their parrots meat - a wrong argument because the flesh of insects is different from what we consider 'meat', it has virtually no fat and no bad cholesterol while chicken, beef, pork has a lot of both these things that are real bad for parrots. There are only two and possibly a third species of parrot that are omnivores, the rest are all herbivores -even the ones that eat insects. See, when it comes to dietary ecology classification of the species, whether an animal is considered a herbivore, a carnivore or an omnivore is, usually, a matter of degree because there is almost always an overlap. We do not say that horses are omnivores because they eat a few insects mixed in with the grass they eat, do we? Neither do we say that lions are omnivores because they eat the stomach (s) and intestines of the herbivore prey they hunt which is filled with plant material. It's the same with parrots. There are two species, and possibly a third, that are omnivores but only the 'possibly' one is kept as a pet and it is not common at all (the vasa parrot). There are species that end up eating quite a bit of insects during breeding season (like some of the cockatoo species that even dig for grubs) but they are still classified as herbivores because the bulk of their diet is plant material. I am not against feeding a bit of insect protein during breeding season and have done it in the past (this year is all askew because of the lockdown) but just a little bit mixed in with their gloop, not a piece of meat! People feed their birds eggs all the time not realizing that there is not a single species of parrot that eats eggs in the wild and that they are real bad for them - they are a bomb of protein, fat and bad cholesterol. Eggs are fine for omnivores and carnivores but not for herbivores because even leaving aside the high level of the wrong type of protein (not all protein is the same) and the fat, the bad cholesterol is slow poison to them because as they did not evolve to eat eggs, nature did not give them any natural mechanism to get rid of the excess so the body sends it all over the place: deposits in their veins and arteries (heart disease, strokes, etc), in their liver in the form of fatty nodules (hepatic lipidosis), in tumors and xanthomas and even as a white blob in their eyes! I know somebody who used to feed her GAC scrambled eggs for breakfast until the bird was diagnosed with a severe and by then chronic and irreversible heart condition at only 10 years of age - she died a few years after despite treatment.
Diet is a very complicated subject, especially when it comes to birds because they are all and without exception opportunistic feeders, meaning, they will try to stick to what nature evolved them to eat but they will eat whatever is available so as not to starve - even if it is something that will end up killing them in the medium to long term (like the lorikeets in England that have been observed eating ground beef from feeders). Their prime directive is to survive long enough to procreate. Period. Aside from that, they are also all seasonal feeders so their diet will change from one season to another... some of them very drastically, like cardinals, for example, which are 90% insectivore/10% granivore during the breeding season to switch to 90% granivore/10% insectivore during the resting one. Parrots switch their diets too although not as markedly as the cardinals.
And yes, I agree with 100%, it is inhuman to trap a wild animal for whatever reason UNLESS it is to help it. But quakers do not have such large clutches - only precocial birds lay so many eggs because they do not need to feed them when they are babies. A quaker clutch is between 4 and 8 eggs.