pellets, what do you do with the fine ground pellet powder?

[ac12]

For you pellet feeders.
My birds will grind up the pellets as they are eating it, and a good amount of that ground up pellets fall out of their mouth as they grind it and is left behind in the food dish. What do you guys do with the ground up pellets?

Sometimes rather than refilling, I will just leave the food dish with the ground pellets. If they are hungry they will eat the ground up pellets, but given a choice they go for the intact pellets.

[B CAMP]

I don't feed my finches pellets but I think you might be able to mix in your egg food

[cindy]

You can add the powder to dried egg food or boiled egg food. I often grind pellets and add it to the dried eggfood or boiled egg to ensure the babies are getting good nutrition.

[DCbeachboy]

I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing the residual pellet powder! I had thought my birds were rebelling against my attempts to convert them into a mixed seed/pellet diet. lol

Actually what I'm seeing sounds a bit more extreme. I can give my birds 2 tablespoons of Harrison's pellet mash in the morning, and by the evening -- after having munched on the mash off and on throughout the day -- they've somehow converted it into 3 tablespoons! I thought it was an illusion at first, but after I finally decided to measure the residual powder, I found that it really IS actually more than when they started.

I spoke with someone at Harrison's about it, and they seem to think the birds -- being accustomed to a seed-only diet -- are probably grinding the pellet mash up and spitting much (most?) of it back out, thinking there are hulls. Because the food is so compressed when shipped, by the time they're through fluffing and grinding it, the residual powder takes up more space than before they ate.

Of course, I'm providing seed separately so I know they're not starving....regardless of whatever portion of the pellets they're actually swallowing. (Who knows?) I'm just about to give up on trying to convert them though....it seems such a waste of feed at this point. If what the Harrison's rep said is indeed what's happening, I'd say they're ingesting only maybe around 15% of the pellet mash....20% at very most.

So I'm ending up with a LOT of powder, and also have looked for opportunities to recycle it. I've found, like others here, that adding a small amount of it to their eggfood seems to work ok. But knowing that the powder has been in their beaks -- where it may have been exposed to bacteria -- I'm reluctant to use the powder for more than a day after it's produced. Maybe I'm overly cautious here, it may be just fine for days afterward....I just haven't risked it yet.