Overweight Budgies??

[BriNicole7]

These are my two budgies Icarus (blue) and Polnareff (white) they eat fruit pellets and a small amount of seeds. Icarus gets plenty of exercise as he flys about the room but Polnareff prefers staying inside his home. I am worried for them, as I fear they may be gaining too much weight. Please help! Any advice is welcome!!! Thank you!

 

[Ripshod]

What do they actually weigh?

How to check your parrots shape

Your parrot needs regular checks to ensure that it is healthy and in correct shape. We’ve provided some useful tips to help you be more hands on with your parrot and to help you find out it’s current shape.

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[Miss_sj]

I had some trouble with this- both of my little fluffbutts used to be overweight. It’s important that you start weighing them, and I would suggest seeing your avian vet for a checkup. The vet really helped me as my biggest problem was fixing their diet up, as mine were seed monsters. It took 8 months for me to convert them to pellets. One of my budgies is also on the lazy side, despite my best efforts with giving her a variety of toys and encouraging her to play games that require her to fly, she is a little love bug and just wants to sit on her humans shoulders! To get her moving, foraging for her seeds really works . Foraging is great as not only does it make them work for their food, it is good intellectually and mental health wise .
There is a lot to take in, a vet is the best placed person to give you advice specific to your birds needs. Also, I will say, I need to be mindful with my hen- if I lay off her weigh in and diet monitoring her weight creeps up again. I have to stay on it!

 

[Sparkles99]

I'm not sure if this will help or not, but I have recently gotten some measuring spoons. I find that my budgies eat more of the seed mix this way, instead of picking out their favourites only. There are always seeds & pellets (unfortunately) left at the end of the day, so I can rest assured that they're getting enough. It is better to eat a whole seed mix than to pick out all the millet & waste 90% of it (what they did when I poured - turns out I've a pretty bad eye for quantity - I was going through a seed bag in less than a week...).

 

[Lady Jane]

Better to have them checked out by avian vet before putting them on any kind of diet and track their weight by writing it down. Birds are weighed in grams and often kitchen scales also weigh in grams. You may have to gradually train them to stand on a scale. Bird scales have perches attached usually. They do not look overweight.

 

[Miss_sj]

I found a method that works well for weighing my cheeky budgies- I bought slim flat kitchen scales and I pretend it’s an iPad. They love iPads and phones so they happily jump on! This strategy only works if you pretend like you don’t want them to stand on it, of course.

 

[grafton]

Based on those photos, those are not overweight budgies.