New budgie – new diet?

MarthaElise

MarthaElise

Regular Member
Hello everyone :)

As suspected all I can think about today is bringing New Little Friend home so here I am asking for more advice :)

How would you recommend introducing the new budgie to a varied diet of veggies/fruits/pellets and not just seed? I'm not 100% sure what he or she has been having up until now but it's likely been purely seed. My late Merlin was super fussy and would eat around the chop to get to the seed so maybe I wasn't going about it right :rolleyes:

Would you also recommend serving veggies/chop separately to seeds, and at different times of the day?

Even though I've done this once before I still feel like a total newbie so very happy to hear any advice anyone may have :)

Thank you :sparkle_heart:
 
Offer everything especially if you have a chomp on it as well to show its food. I don't stop offering just because they turn their beak up at something they only get to do that if they have tried something a couple of times and keep binning it
Apple and grape and dark leaf veggies like kale or spring greens oh and broccoli are your places to start.
Millet sprays obviously but just be stead with those as they can be very fattening.
 
DizzyBlue covered this well.

Offer a wide selection, often and don't give up just because your birb has ignored it (for weeks and weeks :) )

Fruit for budgies is an occasional treat only, as there's too much sugar for them as a staple. Offer it every day at first but once your budgie is starting to enjoy it, only supply it once or twice per week.

Chop is preferred by some budgies but my guys prefer bamboo skewers, pinned to the side of the cages. Typically, I will skewer spinach, cavolo nero, kale, apple slices, sugar snap peas and babycorn. I use small elastic bands to help secure the spinach and the babycorn onto the skewers. Babycorn is a great tool - the budgies love shredding it to bits and it gets them near to (and interested in) the other items.

20240904_125833_resize.jpg (They've already shredded the babycorn to death here.)

My budgies also love herbs. I offer them herb pots from the supermarket - basil, mint, thyme and rosemary (and sage when I can get it). The hens in particular love to throw themselves into "the Herb Jungle" that I have set up for them and have a good "surf".

20240901_Img_3691.jpg

I also use what I call Forage Gyms. These are toys you can get on-line and I fill them with paper pellets and food items that the budgies can search for in a naturalistic fashion.

20240809_152537_resize.jpg 20240902_083746_resize.jpg

If you want to encourage budgies to eat healthily, the seed you offer needs to be limited or else they will gorge themselves on seed and ignore everything else. This is ticklish as you don't want your budgie going hungry with too little seed and them not knowing that veggies are food. The method here is to supply a couple of tablespoons of seed every day but to reduce the quantity slowly, very slowly down to perhaps a single tablespoon (or maybe less). This will encourage the budgie to forage around for more food and make them more prepared to try new types.

I would urge budgie carers (and other parrot owners) to invest in a suitable set of scales for measuring your birds weight. Regular weighings (daily is good, weekly is minimum) will enable you to monitor your birb's weight and see trends. Rapid weight gain or loss can indicate an issue or problem - for instance, I used to use this method back when Chocobo, my kakariki, was broody so that I had advance warning that she was growing eggs. This enabled me to take certain steps not relevant to budgie care here.
Weight can tell you quite a bit about the health of your flock and also how well your feeding strategy is going.

This was a more involved post than I had intended :)
 
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