switching to pellet food

[zebsoc]

For society finches
Has anyone had success in switching birds raised on seed
To primarily pellet food?

From reading posts i realize everyone has their own personal preferences as to what diet is the best for their birds.

Just need to know is it possible
And truly successful
Or will some birds be likely to refuse to switch to pellets?


Also from reading posts - r there any easy to use and to find
Water testing kits for ph, etc

[Dave]

It just depends on the individual bird.

When I switched birds to pellets it eventually worked. But, the birds just sat around all day. When the diet was switched back to seed + greens + egg food, they became much more active again.

[Icearstorm]

zebsoc

As for water, pH probably isn't that important; if you drink the water from the tap or a filter, your birds should be fine with it. But if for some reason you suspect an issue, litmus paper is cheap and easy to test with; just stick it in the water and it will change color which can be interpreted using a key. They sell a kit at Petco: pH Test Kit

[zebsoc]

Icearstorm - thank you for the information and link.

Dave - I wonder if that is why my birds aren't very active most of the time
I do now give them seed daily as treats which I do think helps.
But pellets are nice since no worries that the hulls are preventing them from eating the seed and it goes to waste because throw it out and add more when still seed left mixed in with the hulls.
And when their main diet is seed I find that they can toss out or avoid most of the types of seed in a seed mix. I think they appreciate and Eat more seed when they see it as a treat.
Easy to tell when pellets getting low and can feed for 2 or 3 days at a time.
I use the Zupreen but wonder if they r really able to digest the claimed nutrients in it since doesn't perk them up.
Variety is best and processed isn't good really for anyone. But processed is what is most easily available. And I just hate dealing with hulls with seeds as their main food.
I feed the seed at the bottom of the cage so it is both a treat and exciting to them to forage for it.
But if I were to add any more I wondered if I had to be sure they were used to pellets or if they could be switched. My birds don't get excited about pellets so I don't want to have to feed seed and have them not like pellets any more. They r finicky eaters.

[zebsoc]

http://www.ladygouldianfinch.com/features_finchfood.php

Article I found interesting about diet for finches

[lovezebs]

zebsoc

There are some people who are die hard believers in pellets.

I am not one of them.

I believe that seed eating birds have evolved for god knows how many tens of thousands of years, by eating seeds, insects, dirt, grasses, worms, flowers, grass seed heads, weeds, etc.

That is their natural diet, and that's what keeps them active, happy, healthy and breeding in the wild.

Offering just pellets (in my opinion) is like expecting us humans to subsist on just vitamins and supplements and powdered nutritional drinks 3 meals a day, year around. No variety, no fun flavours, no suprises to look forward to when meal times come around.

Birds are foraging creatures, and need to have that as part of their lives. As it is, they are limited by what we have to offer them, so I think we should offer them as much as we can to make their lives as happy and rich as we can, and as close to nature as possible.

That's why I buy different kinds of seeds, different kinds of fruits and vegetables, spray millet, different items to make my bird grit. That's why I make my egg food, and go weed and wild grass picking whenever possible and offer foraging boxes, with twigs, dry leaves, grasses, seed heads, stones, mealworms, seeds, dry egg food, bits of dry fruit, spray millet buds, bits of tree bark, moss, hay, alfalfa, and all sorts of fun stuff ....with the occasional pellet thrown in.... No one ever seems to go for the pellets for some reason (I wonder why).

If you are going to offer pellets, please also offer your birds some seeds on a daily basis. Make life a little bit more fun for them, and try a foraging box.

Just my opinion.

[Sheather]

I find finches readilly accept lafeber's and Zupreem fruit blend, and from there can be weaned onto larger pellets, like Roudybush.

I use pellets in conjunction with seed and fresh foods. I think variety is best.

[Sojourner]

zebsoc

MILLIONS of years of evolution, not just thousands. MILLIONS. That is what is behind the diet of our modern day finches.

Pellets are full of fillers and corn. My guys won't touch them. Petco store policy is that the birds are to be fed a pellet diet - but the birds at the local stores, at least, do not eat the pellets and store personnel end up feeding seed on top of the pellets anyway.

I use a gravity feeder for my finches and hulls do not build up on top of the food. There are also those vacation hopper feeders that a lot of folks use.

As for them being picky eaters, my guys also did that when I was feeding "finch mix" - they picked around all the stuff they didn't like or tossed it. That would be the rape seed (tiny round black seed), flax, and - wait for it - the pellets.

The solution is to just switch them to a plain parakeet blend of only millet, oat groats, and canary reedgrass seed (aka canary seed). I get mine in bulk from a locally owned mostly-bird shop. They generally eat that just fine. The only exception to that was when I mixed some extra oat groats in while my hen was trying to sit a nest - for some reason she got pissy about the extra oat groats and started tossing that. Solution being - don't add extra oat groats to the parakeet seed, LOL!

Are you feeding your guys veggies? I buy a salad mix called "Spring Kale Mix" which I get at Costco but have seen in smaller bags at a local grocery, and I think also at Trader Joe's. There is no spinach in it - I no longer feed spinach since I lost a hen to egg binding due, I believe, in large part to the fact I was free-feeding them spinach (high in oxalic acid which binds to calcium and depletes calcium reserves) and they stuffed themselves on it.

The Spring Kale mix is broccoli strips, kale, chicory, and sliced brussel sprouts. Mostly kale and broccoli strips. They also readily eat baby kale and arugula.

Just put some on a plate on the bottom of the cage each morning. My guys took to it right away. I have had difficulty switching them to anything else now that they're used to it but I imagine that would have been true of any mix I started them out on. In fact, they have become so acclimated to the Spring Kale mix that they won't bother with broccoli flowerets any more, which they used to go ape-sh** over, LOL! Still every once in awhile I'll buy a small quantity of something else and offer it.

There is plenty of evidence that a pellet diet leads to nutritional deficiencies and breeding problems. Even if you don't want to breed, you'll want to keep your birds in top condition. That doesn't happen with pellets, even if you CAN eventually force them to eat them.

Try a gravity or hopper feeder - I don't see hull build up in mine, nor a lot of tossing of seed since switching to the plain parakeet mix.

For variety, I offer other seed in small shallow egg biscuit cups or thumb or finger cups, such as nyjer, sesame seed, chia seed, hulled hemp, poppy seed, extra oat groats or canary reedgrass seed, sunflower chips. I get these from the bulk bins at Winco/Cub Foods. Also a sprouted seed mix I get from Trader Joe's that they will eat most of. Just one or two of these at a time in addition to the plain parakeet mix that is their staple, and (of course) the daily veggies. They will go off and on these for no apparent reason but will eat all of them occasionally. If they're off something, I'll just remove it from the cage and replace it with something else and offer it again another time.

Oh yeah, and dry egg food - CeDe canary blend is what they prefer. They won't eat actual mashed boiled eggs.

I also make a bird bread or seed cake that has no corn in it. I use the flour of "ancient" grains such as teff, buckwheat, kamut, and spelt - basically whatever I can find in the bulk bins at Winco. I use some oat bran, wheat germ, and wheat bran; a bit of unsweetened coconut flour or else unsweetened coconut flakes; hulled millet; a baked sweet potato (skinned), and the odd bit of fruit on occasion such as half a banana and some seedless grapes, and eggs, whole with the shell. Lots of chopped veggies - there is a broccoli slaw mix I get at Winco that the birds don't seem to care for as much as their Spring Kale mix but its way cheaper and goes into this seedcake fine.

I whip up the eggs with the shell first then add any additional wet ingredients (like fruit) and blend well. Then I'll add the broccoli mix and mix just enough to chop the pieces up. Coconut at this point also, if I'm using it. About 1 T per egg of hemp oil. Then I pour it out and mix in my flours and other dry ingredients until its about the consistency of play-doh. Then I press it out onta a cookie sheet with sides that I have lined with aluminum foil with teflon - in a low oven, like 270F - until it seems "done", then I break it up into chunks and freeze it.

The parakeets love it, the finches eat it off and on. I figure its just one more way to give them some nutritional variety.

[Sheather]

That is a great diet, but beyond the means of most people.
I feed all of my guys a wild finch mix with two millets and canary seed mixed with Abba canary mix - which has more canary seed, hemp, oat groats, bits of dried fruit and eggfood. I've fed this mix for years with good results, alternating 1 or 2 days a week with Roudybush or Lafeber's pellets. Daily greens, usually lettuce, baby kale, mustard or a spring mix, and broccoli daily or a few times a week. My finches used to like the florets but I notice they know eat the stalks, so I give the canaries the tops and the finches the bottoms, chopped into strips. The parakeets eat both, but only a bit, and prefer their greens leafy. I don't feed eggfood regularly when there aren't babies - a couple times a month. My birds seem to do well.

My canaries accept a wider variety of produce than the other birds, and also like oranges, apples, carrots, and sweet potatoes. Oh - and everyone likes some sweet corn now and again.

[Dave]

The solution is to just switch them to a plain parakeet blend of only millet, oat groats, and canary reedgrass seed (aka canary seed).

I like to go one step further, and put one seed variety in one cup--if you have room for the cups you can serve 3-5 seed varieties, and there is no waste because they just eat varieties they want.

It is interesting to see preferences change (seasonally? or with breeding, then feeding chicks?).

[Sojourner]

That is a great diet, but beyond the means of most people.

You think so? Given that I am on disability and definitely very near the bottom of the economic heap, I'm wondering why you think so.

This is MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper than buying pellets. Pellets are expensive; parakeet seed as their staple seed, salad stuff, and stuff from the bulk bins that they eat in small amounts from time to time are all cheap.

I am still working my way through the first bag of mineral mix I bought over a year ago.

The box of CeDe is also about a year old and is only half gone at most.

The egg bread had maybe $4 worth of ingredients in it and its not even 20% used up - there's still most of it in the freezer yet.

Vita drops run about $6 a bottle and lasts for a bit more than a year.

Crushed egg shell is virtually free when you save the shells from baking or breakfast, but I also bought a box of hatched! crushed eggshells over a year ago and that, too, has hardly been touched.

Small quantities of any of the "exotic" seeds I feed my guys still only amount to pennies per batch when I buy them. Nyjer seed is super cheap since I buy it in 25lb to 50 lb bags for my wild birds - ditto the sunflower chips.

So where is the expensive stuff that is "beyond the means of most people"?

[Sojourner]

Dave

I would do that, but I have no source for millet seed other than the hulled millet in the bulk bins at Winco/Cub foods. I will only use the hulled millet in the seed cake I make. Oh and I forgot - I also put 5 grain cereal in that. It's rolled grains - looks like oatmeal. Actually one of the grains IS oatmeal - I think the others are barley, rye, red wheat, and something that escapes me at the moment. Ah, triticale, which is an older ancestor of wheat.

I can get oat groats and canary reed grass seed in bulk at the bird shop, but for some reason they don't stock any millet or millet blends (there are 2 or 3 types of millet in most parakeet or finch mixes). The oat groats and canary reed grass seed by themselves are not sufficient. Except for the one time, when Pyewacket had apparently gone off the oat groats, they never to rarely scatter anything out of the gravity feeder that I use for the plain parakeet blend.

[Phocid]

My Javas made the switch to pellets less than a week after I brought them home. I mixed Lafeber’s daily finch diet with a generic finch seed mix, and gradually left out the seed. Now they get a mix of Lafeber’s and Zupreem. Some birds are more willing to try a fattier pellet like Roudybush or Harrison’s, and I personally feel that crumbles are easier to accept than formed pellets. Once your birds are taking those, you can wean them on to a lower-fat pellet.

As for pellet diets being boring- well, any diet will be boring if it never varies. Aside from offering different produce, I try not to feed the same food the same way two days in a row. Say one day I put the pellets in a hanging cup, full leaves of greens in a cage clip, and the fruit/veggies on a plate on the floor. The next day I might put the pellets on the plate, chopped greens in a different hanging cup, and the fruit on a hanging skewer. Sometimes I’ll deliberately place the food so it’s hard to get. Maybe I’ll soak the pellets in water, juice, or decaffeinated green tea, or mix everything all together. Point is, there are unlimited ways to add enrichment value to even the most limited diets.

I understand the argument that finches evolved to eat seeds, but the energy needs and food availability for a wild bird are very different from those of a pet. And the seeds wild birds evolved to eat are from the wild vegetation of their home ranges, not the domesticated varieties commonly found in seed mixes

[ac12]

So I am in the minority.

I feed almost all my birds pellet food.
The bird "room" is a corner of my family room. And seed hulls fly all over the place, which is why most are on pellet diet.

Lafebers finch food for the gouldians, and Roudybush nibbles for the societies. The Lafebers is to get them to eat more of the pellets. When given larger pellets, they will "hull" the pellets and leave pellet dust in the dish. With the smaller Lafebers, they eat the smaller ground pieces also, so there is less waste.
I have 2 exceptions: fire finch have resisted conversion and I gave up trying, wife's canary.

The only time they get seeds is when they are setup to breed, or as treats.

I suppliment with chopped hard boiled egg + veggies once or twice a week. Cages with molting birds get it every other day. Mating birds every day.

I convert all inbound birds to pellets during quarantine.

[Sojourner]

Finches actually evolved to eat mostly seed in the "milk" stage and vegetation and fruits as they come available over the course of a season.

So no, an all-dry-seed diet (millet, canary reed grass seed, and oat groats mostly) is not natural or good for them.

However neither is an all-pellet (or any pellet IMNSHO) diet.

They need about 80% fresh veggies and the rest seed as we can provide it. In early spring when there is a flush of weeds here before the harsh summer sun and heat sets in, I can occasionally manage some weed seed in the milk stage (before I have to lop it all down so the HOA doesn't get on my case, LOL!).

In Australia, you can buy a variety of seed for your bird frozen at the milk stage. Nothing like that here that I know of and if there is something, I bet its mind-numbingly expensive.

But a largely-veggie-with-seed-supplement diet is the closest we can get to that.

If mess is a problem try vacation hoppers and gravity feeders. My guys scatter very little from their gravity feeders where using the ubiquitous D-cups resulted in scattered seed, hulls, and hulls sitting on top of seed. Nightmare in oh-so-many ways.

I also have my long bird cage sitting in a plant tray which catches 90% of anything that does ultimately get scattered. What little manages to escape that gets swept up in the normal course of things. No extra vacuuming required. No carpet either so that may be an additional consideration - I'd vacuum more often if carpet were involved.

Now my budgies are a horse of a different color. With them its not so much seed scattering - though that was an issue when they were on an all-seed diet but is less so now that I have them eating at least some veggies - its the constant shedding of feathers. Pellets, even if they WOULD eat them (and I don't want them to, given pellets are mostly corn anyway) don't even enter into it. The shed feathers alone make it necessary to vacuum around them regularly.

Note that corn is the #1 ingredient for both the mentioned pellets which are supposedly "high quality" - nothing that is mostly corn can be "high quality" feed for finches and other caged birds. Or cats and dogs, for that matter, but that is another forum entirely.

Roudybush ingredients:

Ground Corn, Ground Wheat, Peanut Meal, Soy Oil,Soy Meal, Hydrated Sodium Calcium Aluminosilicate, Yucca schidigen Extract,Salt, Calcium Carbonate, L-Lysine, DL-Methionine, Mixed Tocopherols, Rosemary Extract, Ascorbic Acid, Citric Acid, Lecithin, Silicon Dioxide (carrier for liquid antioxidants), Sodium Selenite (on Calcium Carbonate), Niacin, Alpha-Tocopherol Acetate (Source of Vitamin E), Biotin, Manganese Sulfate, Calcium Pantothenate, Zinc Oxide, Riboflavin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Vit. A Acetate, Thiamine, Menadione Sodium Bisulfite Complex (Vit K), Cyanocobalamin (VitB12), Vit D3 Sup. Folic Acid, Ethylenediamine Dihydriodide, Propionic Acid, Ammonium Hydroxide, Acetic Acid, Sorbic Acid, Tartaric Acid, and natural apple flavoring.

The first 5 ingredients are things that are far far outside the normal purview of the natural wild finch diet. And peanut meal introduces the risk of aflatoxin. I never feed any bird peanut products. Its not worth the risk and it is nothing that is even remotely ever a part of their diet normally.

The Lafeber finch pellets:

Ground corn, soybean meal, wheat flour, oat groats, cane molasses, dried whole egg, canola oil, dicalcium phosphate, ground limestone, iodized salt, citric acid, dl-methionine (an essential amino acid), l-lysine (an essential amino acid), vitamin A supplement, vitamin D3 supplement, vitamin E supplement, ascorbic acid, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of vitamin K activity), niacin supplement, calcium pantothenate, riboflavin supplement, thiamine mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, vitamin B12 supplement, folic acid, copper lysine, choline chloride, zinc oxide, manganese oxide, mixed tocopherols (a preservative), biotin, sodium selenite.

Of the first 5 ingredients, three are non-normal and one (the cane molasses, eg SUGAR) should never be put in bird food.

As has been noted, birds in cages are far less active than their wild counterparts - which means their caloric intake should be adjusted accordingly so as not to end up with fat birds. For some odd reason, budgies on an all seed diet are far more prone to obesity than are similarly fed finches. Possibly something to do with the larger birds being kept in small cages and therefore even less opportunity for flight than the much smaller finches in similarly sized cages.

It also seems to be much rarer for people to go to the trouble of teaching their pet-store birds, especially budgies, to eat veggies. Budgies seem far more suspicious of alternate food sources - it took me a year to get them to eat their veggies and I still have to "trick" a lot of it into them in the form of corn-free veggie bread for birds.

Caged birds need their veggies EVERY SINGLE DAY. It should be 80% of their diet regardless of what the other 20% consists of.

And poo-pooing the entertainment value of hulling their seed isn't going to change the fact that they need whatever activity we can provide them. Encouraging foraging and working to get their food as much as possible is important, not something you can slough off with an "oh-boring-eyeroll-eyeroll" kind of attitude.

Keeping our guys diets balanced and interesting is for sure more work than just dumping a handful of pellets in their cage once a week and waiting for it to be reduced to pellet-dust. But it is what our caged birds need.

They don't need pellets at all, nor all-seed diets. They need mostly veggies every single day, supplemented by a variety of other seeds and regularly offered egg food for extra protein - mostly to get amino acids that are not available in grains and veggies.