Hand Feeding a Parakeet

Video Transcript

"I am explaining in this video how to feed a baby budgie. This is mostly for short instructional or emergency purposes if by chance you ended up with a breeding pair of budgies and they stopped feeding their babies or something happens to one or both of the parents and they need to be hand fed, one gets chilled and falls out of the nest sometimes parents will pick on one particular baby and stop feeding it, if you wanted to attempt to try to feed these baby birds this is how you kind of need to go about doing it. You need to get a hand feeding formula which you can generally pick up at your local pet store. It will be, you can pick up Harrison's hand feeding, Exact and Lafeber both make a parrot hand feeding formula. You need to add warm water to it until it makes a slushy kind of mix. This stuff is drained and it is only green because of the particular brand I use. It should be a brownish gray. It should be a little bit thinner than apple sauce. Again you need to use warm water and it needs to be just above your own body temperature so about 100 degrees. It is very important that you mix it thoroughly or if it has any hot spots and it is too hot when it goes into the bird you can actually burn a hole into their crop which is the pre-stomach of this baby bird and it can actually pour right out the hole so it can burn a hole right in their stomach so it is something that you need to be very careful about. So if you have got a baby about this age, as they get hungry they make these begging noises. This here is their crop. As you can see it is quite full, this area here is his body but this is his crop and he still thinks he is very hungry so I am going to offer him some food to show you how to do it. I use a 3 cc syringe to offer them food. Basically it is pretty easy. You want to go real slow and depressing the syringe very slowly try not to get it on the outside of their mouths. As long as they are making very very adamant gesture right there they close off their wind pipes and when their wind pipes are closed off they can't choke. If they don't seem to be making this begging commotion you need to be very very careful about putting liquid in their mouth as they could choke and die. So this is with a younger bird and his begging and we will go to this one also. This bird although it is five weeks old is still completely on hand feeding formula. This bird will not be able to eat seeds on his own until he is almost eight weeks old. He will depend on his parents for supplemental feedings until then. Also remember that when you are starting to feed these baby budgies that it is going to be a two month old long task where you will be feeding these guys when they are very young as that younger guy was with very few feathers, every three hours, and as they get older, every six hours around the clock, 24 - 7 until they are weened. You know this is his seed mix. I could show it to him offer it to him and he has no idea that this is edible and he will have not idea until he gets older. Even if I give him a little tiny piece to try to put in his mouth he just spits it out and he doesn't recognize it as food. It is a very very slow process. You are going to have to show them how to eat understand that if you decide to hand feed one of these birds it is a long process that can take a long time. They can choke and aspirate on their food. If it is too hot it can burn a hole in their crop and until they are fully feathered they need to be kept in a very warm environment. This is a makeshift incubator made out of foam. You need to put a warm layer of towels and it has got a hole at the top for air movement. If I leave just the hole open it ends up being too cool and there is too much transfer so I use just paper towel plug which still allows a good exchange of oxygen without chilling the baby bird inside. Again I really recommend using this clip only as an emergency. Don't try this at home unless you have to. Go to an experienced hand feeder basically if need a baby budgie that has been hand fed. Leave it to the experts because it would be a heart breaking experience to try to buy a baby budgie and have it die because you did not know what you were doing and it choked on its food or got chilled during the night. So that is the basics of emergency feeding of a baby budgie if you need to do it. "