Diet Tips for Parakeets

Video Transcript

"On this clip we are going to talk about the importance of food with budgies. The biggest health problems these guys have, is generally related to diet. A lot of times people will have a parakeet and, one day, they didn't even notice that the parakeet was sick and, it is dead at the bottom of the cage. What can happen a lot of times is, basically, bird seed that is bought in a bin or bought in a pet store, is probably one of the worst things that you can considered feeding your parakeet. The reason being, that none of the stuff that is going into a pet store, is FDA approved. That means that there is no one checking, or quality checking the food that goes in to make sure that it doesn't have parasites; to make sure it doesn't have bugs; to make sure that that grain doesn't have something called the "fungal toxin". Fungus will grow in those bins as they sit there for months and months until somebody buys it of the shelf. Or it had been sitting in a grain store and those fungus, as they start eating some of the grain, they produce a toxin. Now these toxins, if your bird digest them, doesn't kill your bird outright or the next day with this new bag of birdseeds you bought. It can be the same brand you always bought, the same pet store you always bought it from. It doesn't matter. It is just that that section of grain that might have been sitting in those bins, finally got enough of those toxins in it to become fatal. If it doesn't kill the bird outright, the other thing that can happen, is those toxins are very similar to the type of toxin that alcohol has on people's liver. So, it causes liver cirrhosis, it damages the liver in their body and, over a long period of time that liver damage eventually causes liver failure or fatty liver disease type things. These guys can die from that as well. They start acting sickly and it shortens their lifespan. The other reason that you don't want to buy pet store or any bird seed for that matter, is that these guys are not seed eaters in the wild, they are granivores. So what they mostly will be eating are grains. So, things like oats, and corn, and they will eat wheat if they can find it, they will eat things like millet. These guys also eats a lot of berries, grains and little shoots that grow off of trees, they will eat grass seeds that are on the Australian grasslands, which are high in fiber, but low in nutrition, low in fat compare to like sunflower seeds, that you pick up here. Mostly, the seeds that these guys get are Americanized seeds, they are fattened up and commercialized a lot. The way that the apples we get in the grocery store are not that close to the wild apples that existed 300 years ago, before we started trying to make a fatter fruit if you will. So they kind of genetically modified. You want to feed these guys foods that you pick up, ideally human grain foods. Human grain foods have been checked by the FDA and somebody actually checks them to make sure that they don't poison us, at least most of the time. So you can go to a Whole Foods, or a Sun Harvest, or any sort of these like whole food kind of stores and out of the human food section, you can use their bins to pickup whole grains to buy for these birds, hulled millet seed, leafy greens, and things like that. You just want to make sure that you used a human grain food for these birds as they can be very sensitive to the toxins and, commercialized bird seed and as well as the type of bird seeds that are used in commercial diets, are too high in fat and too low in protein and fiber for this species. "