Best formulas for budgies

[sith'ari]

Typically I do not hand rear my budgies unless I have to for some safety reason, as I am a proponent of avoiding hand feeding species like budgies because they are easily socialized and tamed by simple gentle handling during and after weaning. However, I do have occasions to hand feed if it is necessary, and I find that my greatest struggle when hand feeding budgies is that it is difficult to get enough nutrition and calories into them to rival the growth of the parent raised chicks who, on a parent-fed diet of RB High Energy + egg food + greens + sprouted seeds + spray millet (evenings), grow like weeds into big, perfect babies.

At the moment I prefer to use RB Formula 3 + "Formula Plus" + a sprinkle of Avi-Culture-2-Plus. For underweight chicks I add a little coconut or peanut oil. I was displeased with the results from Kaytee Exact which seemed to lead to insufficient growth and slower feathering, aside from the fact that it smelled terrible in my opinion.

This comes up now because recently I adopted an 11-week-old blue-throated macaw baby (too young to be rehomed indeed, I have another thread in the macaw category explaining the circumstances), and I was immediately concerned about having the same issue in getting enough calories because macaws require more fat than most parrots. I ordered Higgins Hi-Energy formula for Helix the macaw, and I am now wondering if that same formula would serve me well for the budgies since my experience tells me they also have extremely high energy requirements during rearing.

Has anyone used Higgins Hi Energy for budgies? If so, what were the results?

Thanks, everyone!

 

[sith'ari]

I want to say as an aside that my breeder friend (and original breeding mentor going back years) was adamant that I'd HAVE to hand feed my cockatiels because it's "impossible" for them to be tame otherwise - and I want to say that so far we have had only one cockatiel chick, a lutino pearl (got lucky first try, 25% chance from this pair and only one egg was fertile most likely due to the change of environment which made them less "in the mood" when I took the pair in), and she is incredibly friendly. She is 5 weeks now and steps up immediately, completely fledged, and her mama is even comfortable feed her when I'm holding her (and the mama wasn't even friendly when I got her). And the best part is that this chick grew to the size of her parents by FOUR WEEKS. She is an absolute monster in size and has perfect feathers. A lutino without the faintest hint of a bald spot. I could not be more pleased with these parent-raised results. I hope more people move to parent-rearing these species.

The attached photo is of her at 21 DAYS! Hatch date 9/9, picture date 9/30. How can I match that by hand-rearing?? (How cute is it that mama needed to come check to make sure she was "in safe hands", so to speak...)

P.S. The 30x18x18 cage in the background contains a budgie pair, the tiels are in a flight.