Feeding African Grays

Video Transcript

"We're here to talk about what you should feed your Grey parrot. We'll touch also on some other of the parrot families. But there is many things that the parrots need and require. And their food and nutrition is very important. Feeding your parrot is very important, they have nutritional needs just like human beings do but depending on the type of bird you have their nutrition is varied some what. Some birds need more protein; other birds need more of curtain vitamins and so forth. And almost all birds need the millet and the millet is essential, gives them a chance to pick at natural foods and in a natural way, to crack the seeds and so forth. And it is good as far as nutrition but it should not be the only food that they are given because it does not have all of the nutrition that they need. I use pellets mainly because birds are like children. They will go through and pick out the candy and leave all the vegetables. Veterinarians have figured this out and so therefore they have actually taken the seed hulls off, ground the seeds up together and they get a very balanced diet. This diet is the fruit flavored supreme diet. There's also Hagen and Roudybush, and many others. I like this one because it when you open the bag the flavor you can smell immediately and the birds just go nuts real quick. Everybody wants to be fed first. They love the food, they do well on the food and so that's the reason I use pellets. But there is seed also given because their natural instinct is to crack seed and I try to keep some of that there. I use probably 90% pellets and 10% seed. This is a seed, basically for Cockatiels. These is set up for some Cockatiels that I received that were not used to pellets, so we're introducing the pellets but as you can see they got millet, they've got safflowers, sunflower seeds as well as the pellets. This particular set of food was formulated by Cab-birds. Sam Cavanagh and Debbie Cavanagh know the nutrition of each bird, and make sure that the proper quantities of each kind of nutrition is included in that type of food. Of course they do the parrot food, the budgie food, the canary and the finch as well as what they call the large bird fire which has a lot of large nuts in it. This is just a small sample. Birds need food that we eat. They need all types of vegetables, they need fruit and the vegetables are peas, beans, of course corn. I give them apples, pears, bananas. And this food should be put in there cage and removed after about two to three hours. Anything that they do not eat needs to be taken out because it can become contaminated and be harmful to the birds. But they do need the fresh fruit and fresh vegetables on a daily basis."