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Pictures A new baby English Budgie

finchly

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You spelled it right ;) I raise my baby birds on their nutribird formula.
Their pellets come in cardboard boxes. So maybe those are an option.
They are readily available here to me but I chose the Hagen over them.

edit; actually... maybe they have a plastic insert... I´m not sure.
No problem if Hagen is better! I just grabbed onto that because she was already buying that brand.
 

Fergus Mom

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Thanks a lot @ferfusmom So pellets are just the grains? Not pressed bars or something ( which is what I imagined ) . If so I did buy those loose weight in a good local store.
I just thought they were supposed to be "reinforced"with minerals and vitamines and that I have not found ( except the egg mix I mentioned )
For now he loves the grains, but I see progress on the fruit which I'm very happy about indeed.
Your birds look lovely too, are they english budgies?
I have another question:
Do you use a harness to walk outside with your birds a little?
Virus is completly obsessed with being outside the cage. He is miserable when i put him back, but I can's spend all the day indoors. Yesterday we sat in the garden and i just took all the cage out he was calm and happy ( we have a lot of birds in the garden robins, and blue tits so lots of singing) . But i was wondering if a "leech
Yes so that's more wide than mine. I will try to get Virus a bigger cage but I need to find one with small bar spacing and that wasn't easy for now.
No, my birds aren't English Budgies. I love the English though, they are gorgeous.
I love taking mine out in their large travel cage to sit and watch nature. Unfortunately, it's getting too hot for that for very long, and the mosquitoes are bad here, so we have to wait until a more temperate time. I have never taken mine out on harnesses, and at this point, they are not tame enough to put a harness on, they only allow me to touch them by them putting their little feet sitting on my finger as a perch when I feed them millet with the other hand! Fiona flew into the other room the other day when I had company, and they were in the living room. No big deal, but she flew somewhere very dusty, and she looked like she had a long old man's goatee hanging off her beak! FUNNY!
 

Shezbug

ASK ME FOR PICTURES OF MY MACAW!
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You spelled it right ;) I raise my baby birds on their nutribird formula.
Their pellets come in cardboard boxes. So maybe those are an option.
They are readily available here to me but I chose the Hagen over them.

edit; actually... maybe they have a plastic insert... I´m not sure.
JMHO......


Going on how fast pellets soak up humidity from the air
Going on how long it takes Burt to seriously let me know that yesterdays pellets are not fit for his consumption (24 hrs and they are stale as far as he is concerned)
Going on how many things can leach through cardboard and/ or climb in through the tiny gaps where it is folded to make the box
Going on the fact cardboard can not ever be air tight keeping contaminants, pests or air out and allowing pellets to loose nutrients in the process

I personally would never buy pellets for my bird that came in anything other than an air tight sealed plastic bag or proper container. In a dream world I would love to eliminate as much waste as possible but you can not/ should not ever consider compromising your birds health or safety for this mission!

I have seen many stores bag up their own mixes and I once saw a pet shop mixing up their own little seed and pellet mix for sale for companion birds......... they had a rat loose in the store (actually more than one which were terrifying all the birds) that they saw run over the food and help itself to a munch while the staff were not actually packing the bags of their special mix. They never scooped even the top layer of the mix away or anything, they just went back to bagging the mix- this is the sort of thing I would never want my bird coming into contact with. Even when I told them I had seen the rat walking on the top of all the food they did not care and just smiled and laughed like it was cute...... If I won't chance eating it then my bird is sure as heck not putting it in his beak!
You can not always trust loose weight places to do the right thing with safe food handling especially if they are self serve for the customers- I will not even go into detail as to why I will no longer purchase loose weight anything that can not be washed or does not need to be boiled before cooking but there are certain things I do not ever wish to share with strangers and one of them is someone else's poor hygiene practices on my food.
 

Zara

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I personally would never buy pellets for my bird that came in anything other than an air tight sealed plastic bag or proper container.
Yes, I agree. The cardboard is what put me off.

edit; actually... maybe they have a plastic insert... I´m not sure.
I have been and looked. It appears there is an air-tight foil packaging inside the cardboard.
@ 4:25 they talk about their packaging;
(keep in mind that is their own promo video, so are obviously trying to sell the product with statements like ¨any bird can be transitioned to pellets¨ etc...)
 

MadIe

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JMHO......


Going on how fast pellets soak up humidity from the air
Going on how long it takes Burt to seriously let me know that yesterdays pellets are not fit for his consumption (24 hrs and they are stale as far as he is concerned)
Going on how many things can leach through cardboard and/ or climb in through the tiny gaps where it is folded to make the box
Going on the fact cardboard can not ever be air tight keeping contaminants, pests or air out and allowing pellets to loose nutrients in the process

I personally would never buy pellets for my bird that came in anything other than an air tight sealed plastic bag or proper container. In a dream world I would love to eliminate as much waste as possible but you can not/ should not ever consider compromising your birds health or safety for this mission!

I have seen many stores bag up their own mixes and I once saw a pet shop mixing up their own little seed and pellet mix for sale for companion birds......... they had a rat loose in the store (actually more than one which were terrifying all the birds) that they saw run over the food and help itself to a munch while the staff were not actually packing the bags of their special mix. They never scooped even the top layer of the mix away or anything, they just went back to bagging the mix- this is the sort of thing I would never want my bird coming into contact with. Even when I told them I had seen the rat walking on the top of all the food they did not care and just smiled and laughed like it was cute...... If I won't chance eating it then my bird is sure as heck not putting it in his beak!
You can not always trust loose weight places to do the right thing with safe food handling especially if they are self serve for the customers- I will not even go into detail as to why I will no longer purchase loose weight anything that can not be washed or does not need to be boiled before cooking but there are certain things I do not ever wish to share with strangers and one of them is someone else's poor hygiene practices on my food.
thanks for sharing.

And it is of course your choice. But as animal and nature lovers we should pay A LOT of attention to the plastic problem.
Firstly because it contains horrible toxins like phtalates, bpa, PBC's etc etc...
these substances give plastics their abilities, but they are also: carcinogenic and mutagenic, endocrine disruptive, you name it!
ALL plastic is considered leaching toxins and it absorbs hazardous substances.
Most people are still NOT aware of this, that's mostly due to heavy lobbying from the plastic makers ( oil and gas companies) .
Further, as a rule plastic is not recycled!
There are exceptions but they usually need a) MORE virgin plastic ( as if we didn't have enough) and b) They will NEVER be recycled twice.

This leaves our nature severely messed up. Belive me I have been studying this for a long time and I have travelled all over the world and seen where plastic ends up .
USA is the worlds biggest plastic exporter ( that number is accounted into the recycling rate) mostly to third world countries.

Voila there you have it. Plastic packaging and love for Nature don't go hand in hand and we are stdying the death rate of birds caused by plastic ( i can tell you already now the rates are huge) .
 

MadIe

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@MadIe Here are a couple pictures of pellets. It is brand available in the US that many people on this forum feed their birds. It is a "manufactured" food, specially formulated with nutrients that birds need. Everyone here will agree that the birds should be fed as much fresh food as possible. Unfortunately most of the bird food here comes packaged in plastic or plastic coated paper.
View attachment 340419 View attachment 340420
Ok great Now I understand what you mean. Thanks for the close up!
A question though, do you mean I should give him more fresh food and not so much pellet ? We only eat organic high quality food so it's easy for me to provide him with healthy fresh foods. I just got the impression they needed the pellets, but maybe I got it all wrong ?
 

Lady Jane

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@MadIe If you do feed high quality fresh foods to your bird you really do not need to feed pellets. However you need to be aware of the vitamin content of the food. The foods should be greens, especially the red, yellow foods such as sweet potato. The pellets a good because most of them contain the necessary vitamins. Many birds are not getting enough Vitamin A which is in the orange, yellow veggies. You can also incorporate many veggies into birdie bread and budgies seem to really like it.

I will pass on a suggestion to you. From personal loss of a dear EB about 6 years ago from Avian Gastric Yeast I did much research into the cause. My breeder told me to feed them lots of corn on the cob to keep weight on. This is a high carb food and the kernels are difficult for humans to digest when in the fresh state because of an outer membrane that may get stuck in the crop and then get a yeast formation. This is not proven nor will you find information on it in the net. I discussed it with my avian vet and he told me at the time this was one of the causes they were looking into. So my suggestion is to avoid feeding fresh corn. I even went further and did not buy the bird food with corn which is many of them. Goldenfeast was the one I found with no corn and I fed Vit D3 supplemented along with a calcium mix.

If you look on nuts.com you will find they sell several of the high quality seeds such as hemp, sesame and others. I did not feed flax seed to my EB female as it is a phytoestrogen and may promote egg laying.

Hope I have been of some help to you.
 

Kiwi & Co.

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This is a good video about making chop (fresh bird food)

 

MadIe

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In your photo of the first food, with the fruit and egg -- Frutti Patee -- that is made by the company Versele Laga. I'm sure I'm spelling it wrong. They make very good foods. You should be able to find a pellet food by them for your bird.
great I will ask them again. ( I asked for pellets but they didn't know what I meant ) Thank you!
 
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