The battle of the veggies

[sparrowsong98]

It has almost been a year with my zebs, and despite me offering veggies almost every day, they still will not eat them! Ugh silly birds. I have been giving them mostly carrot peelings, and sometimes cucumbers or apples or spinach as well. I have just been putting it on top of the food I give them, and they throw it off. It seems to me that they should be eating them by now. What have I done wrong?

[Icearstorm]

sparrowsong98

Hmm, that's annoying. It's hard to know why they still refuse to eat vegetables, though it's likely that their parents and any other birds they had been around didn't eat fresh vegetables, either. Maybe a video of finches eating vegetables (or better yet, real birds) could convince them to eat the vegetables.

Maybe they don't like the texture, considering that they've been eating dried seed. Perhaps you could try giving them dried vegetables by crumbling it over their seed. Even better, get some vegetable pellets for budgies and other small birds. These should look more like their seed. Broccoli could also be better for this reason, as the florets are a similar shape to seeds, and the idea of picking them off is kind of like spray millet.

You might be able to convince them to eat it by providing strands of greens that they can use as nesting material. Mush up the ends of the vegetable so the bird tastes the juice when it picks up the leaf. This would increase the chances that the bird would figure out that vegetables are edible.

The birds might not associate the colors of vegetables with food, as most seeds and eggfood are a plain yellow color. Try switching out the food dish for a dark green one, and remove anything else in their line of sight that is green. After a couple of weeks, give them green vegetables in the green dish, or remove the dish for a few minutes and clip greens on the side of the cage where the dish was. They might be more interested in eating greens after that.

Getting them to eat new food will probably be most successful with a combination of approaches. Also check out articles on how people get their picky kids to try new foods (especially those involving hypersensitive or autistic kids). Some of the ideas could be applicable to your birds.

[wildbird]

Get a shredder from the grocery store and shred the carrot in a separate dish from the seed. Chop the veggies into smaller pieces and put a little millet seed on top. Then put the food on small flat dish & place on the cage floor. Usually they like cooked corn.

[Babs _Owner]

sparrowsong98

Anything I want my finch to try, I take a cuttlebone and a spoon and coat it with cuttlebone powder.

They are instantly attracted to the cuttlebone powder and will also ingest, taste the food as well.

If they dont take the food after you have let force a snows-sprinkle of cuttlebone powder on it, it just means they dont like those veggies.

Swiss chard cut in thin strips is a big hit in my room no matter what the species. And I dont need cuttlebone to tempt them.

[sparrowsong98]

wildbird I used to do that. They just would not touch it. When I put it on their food, they were at least throwing it off, meaning that they were tasting it. I fifured that was better than just letting them ignore it.

[Sojourner]

My finches immediately took to green leafy veggies. I started with spinach but no longer feed that any more due to its high oxalic acid content (which caused egg binding leading to death in one of my first pair of hens).

Mine eat arugula, baby kale, shredded broccoli stems. They won't touch anything orange - carrots and sweet potatoes. They will eat purple cabbage which comes in an Asian Salad blend I was getting at Costco.

I didn't have to mix in seed for the finches, but my parakeets were much more stubborn. If you must mix in seed, use hulled seed, otherwise hulls stick to the veggies and make them even less attractive to a picky bird.

However what worked better for my stubborn stubborn parakeets was to start making a corn-free bird bread. Here's the "recipe":

http://www.finchforum.com/viewtopic.php ... it=+recipe

I put some bird bread on a plate in the bottom of the cage and sprinkled veggies all over it. At first they tossed the veggies but soon they were eating both the bird bread and the veggies. I'm out of the bird bread at the moment and have been for awhile - was busy with a terminally ill dog for almost 6 months. I really need to make some more. I make up a big batch and break it up and freeze it. Not only was it full of veggie goodness (and NO CORN) in and of itself, but for whatever reason, it facilitated getting them to eat the fresh as well.