FINCHforum

So i was getting frustrated with the amount of waste.
I have currently between me and my daughter and in our care temporarily.
Green cheek Conure
Parrotlets
a Love bird
Budgies
a pair of ringneck doves
and my finches (and one weaver who has ticked me off)

Anyways, hard to find proper blends that dont have filler that gets wasted

Corn in most parrot feed, the oat groats in most lovebird/cockatiel/budgie mixes and the Nyjer seed in my finches and the Doves.
These things take up a significant portion of the bags and then i have to toss it(well i actually throw my seed wast out for the wild birds in the yad but still adds up expense)

So I mixed everyone their own blend of(size appropriate) seeds from this list:
Armstrong Persistence Mix
Mixed Nuts
Sunflower seeds in shell
Black oil bits out of shell
Pumpkin seeds shelled
Hemp in shell
Hemp hearts out of shell
Safflower
White millet
Red millet
German millet
Canary grass
Flax
Steel cut oats

Also added to the finch mix a bag of 'Holy Crap' that contains:
Chia
Hulled Hemp
Buckwheat
Dried:
Cranberries
Raisins
Apple
Cinnamon

I also dusted them all with a vitamin powder because some of the birds are being more resistant to eating the fresh fruit/veg mixes i keep trying.
I am quite pleased with how they turned out, and so glad we found the bulk single seeds.
Funny enough i feel like I need a nap now, but I am off to clean cages.

Kittengames

That's quite the mixture, wow.

Does it contain everything that they need?
And the BIG question, do they all eat it?

It would be interesting to offer each of these separately, to see which they eat voluntarily.

Also, vitamin powder on seed doesn't get into the bird. They shell the seed and most of the powder is gone with the husk. And because birds have a dry tongue and mouth, the powder doesn't stick to the bird.

Lots of the seeds are was less. ..already shelled...at least for the smaller birds...the bigger ones have fruits and nuts in their mixes too so I think they will get some of the vitamins. So far each seems to like their mixes...I originally watched for what they always left...so I know the biggest ones to avoid for each of the blends. I will post pictures of each later.

Kittengames

With all due respect.....
The Finch/ Canary/Budgie seeds, are most certainly not hulled.
The birds crack them open, eat the inside, and the hulls get left behind.

lovezebs Kittengames

Even if you have found hulled varieties of seed for birds, you really shouldn't feed it. Birds in cages have very little to stimulate them. Hulling seed actually IMPROVES their condition and temperament because it occupies them.

In fact a big part of the improvement in my budgies behavior of late has been the added value of foraging for their food, which I discovered quite by accident. When I was struggling to introduce veggies into their diet - and an epic struggle it was, too - at one point I was chopping their veggies up very finely and then coating them in wheat germ and wheat bran - which actually DID encourage them to eat the veggies, but not for the reasons I thought.

What they were doing, it turns out, was rooting through the wheat germ/bran and picking out the veggie bits. Because it turns out wheat germ/bran doesn't actually stick all that well to chopped veggies, LOL!

Whereas at that time they were still turning their beaks up at just the chopped veggies on a plate.

So now what I do is dehydrate some veggies and keep that aside. Whenever I want to introduce something new, I mix it with the dried veggie bits - and they will "forage" through the dried veggies (and even eat some of it) to find the other food as well.

I do use some hulled seed such as hemp (which is too hard for finchly beaks to hull, and probably budgies as well) but in the main I only offer seeds with hulls in their seed cups.

I do have some hulled millet but use it only in bird bread or sometimes added into their veggie mix to avoid issues with hulls sticking to the veggies - which I now believe was part of the reason sprinkling seeds on the chopped veggies didn't work to encourage them to eat the veggies.

I add chia seed - just a pinch - to anything I'm trying to get them to eat. The seed is so small that they just seem to eat them whole - I've never seen any sign of hulls from chia seed. Flax and sesame seed are much the same, they don't seem to get hulled, just eaten as-is.

Buckwheat, hulled or no, seems to be too hard for either finches or parakeets. However I get a "sprouted seed" mix at Trader Joe's (which is apparently supposed to be sprinkled onto human food or cereal) that has "sprouted" buckwheat seeds in it and that they can and do eat.

But in the main, any staple seed or seed offered alone in a seed cup is hulls-on. I'm trying to think of anything else I offer them occasionally that is hulled, other than the hemp, and can't come up with anything off the top of my head. Oh wait, I used to offer them rolled 5 grain cereal from time to time, but I put that in the bird bread these days. Anyway.

They need the additional stimulation of hulling their seed and (in the case of budgies and even more so the larger parrots) even foraging on top of that for their mental well-being.

Anything you sprinkle on their seed, hulled or not, is not getting to them effectively. Vitamins need to go in their water. I use Oasis Vita-Drops - about $6 on Amazon and lasts my 4 birds for almost a year.

I guess I don't see why you think steel cut oats are better than oat groats? I see it exactly the other way around - both my finches and my budgies love to hull the oat groats and actually prefer that to either the rolled or the steel-cut oats.

It's a tiny part of parakeet mix anyway - which I feed as staple seed to all my guys as the finches pick around and reject everything in "finch mix" except the millet, oat groats, and canary reed grass seed, eg, BUDGIE MIX, LOL!

Speaking of which - you are feeding mass quantities of veggies to all these guys, right? Because seed-only diets are not good even for true granivores like budgies. Yes, they eat 80% seed in the wild, but mostly at the milk stage, not the dried out stuff we insist on feeding them year round. So veggies are an important part of the diet for most caged birds who aren't actual obligate insectivores.

Also keep in mind that in the wild, budgies get most of their water intake from the green seed and vegetation that makes up the vast majority of their diets. They drink actually very little water. So like cats on dry kibble, they are going to be dehydrated pretty much all the time because their thirst mechanism just doesn't work hard enough to help them make up for the lack of water in kibble/dry seed.

And yet they are all too often acclimated in the cage to a dry seed diet so getting them to eat their veggies is usually an exercise in frustration. I know my guys still all too often turn up their beaks at "wet" foods. It took me most of a year to get them to eat their veggies, and the improvement in condition, activity, behavior, and temperament was immediate.

So don't forget the veggies - it should make up the majority of their diets rather than seed.

Sorry. I might not have been to clear...I don't means the finch seeds are all hulled... I meant only that some of the things in their mixes were hulled...I think the hemp hearts and the black oil sunflower seed bits...I am aware they eat the insides of the others like the millet ect.

I stopped buying the store blends because so much was getting wasted...the things they won't eat:
Budgies,parrot let's, love bird....oat groats...none of them will eat them and they seem to be in all of the mixes...
I chose the steel cut oats because they are partially broken already and the ground oats seemed a little too processed...I used those because it was also something I had on hand that I use for ourselves...same with the 'Holy crap' cereal...it was something on hand that my hubby has been to lazy to use...so might as well not waste it considering the tiny bag runs 12$ here...when I first brought the birds home and realized no stores were open I actually gave them millet the firs night because it was something we cook for ourselves and we had it. I am not fond of wasting anything and spending money on bags of seed that anywhere from 25%-50% is being tossed out to the wild birds just feels awfull considering our economy is in the drains and my husband spent just over a year unemployed.

There is corn in most of the big Bird blends...and for some that takes up a Large portion of the mix...
And the finches and doves leave the nyger seed and canola seeds...which makes up neAR half of most of the finch blends you can buy here...
So each has their own mix now...the bigger stuff for the conure...the parrotlet's and lovebird and budgies all get a medium and the finch and doves get a small seed blend...if that makes sense.
They all get various fruit and veggies clipped to the side but having a hard time convincing them to try many new things. At least half of them came from seed only places and a few got just fruit added so it's taking some time to get them used to anything different though we are making progress.
I can try vitamins to add to their water but I have had finicky birds in the past so figured I would try the powder.

My phone is making this difficult to type out sorry if I am not clear or missed something.