APPENDIX LINKS
When it comes to
avian diet, there is a huge controversy. Avian vets, breeders, pet shop professionals, bird guardians,
researchers, rescuers, etc all have their own opinion as to what constitutes
the perfect diet and each of them makes claims to it. But the sad truth is that none of them is
correct because nobody knows what most birds’ nutritional needs are. We simply have no guidelines. There just hasn’t been enough research
done. Consider that the first pellets,
touted as a complete or total diet for pet birds, were done based on what the
manufacturers knew over twenty years ago on chickens nutritional needs! To give them credit, manufacturers of bird
food are trying to catch up and they have made enormous strides in the right
direction but it is a work in progress and by no means perfect. Therefore, the responsibility of providing
the best diet possible falls to the bird guardian.
Here are a few
pointers:
- HEALTHY BIRDS EAT HEALTHY DIETS
- THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PACKAGED
‘COMPLETE DIET’
- SPECIES EVOLVE TO THRIVE ON FOOD
AVAILABLE IN THEIR NATURAL HABITAT
- BIRDS DO NOT CHOOSE TO
EAT WHAT IS GOOD FOR THEM
The old axiom ‘We are what we eat’, is even truer for birds
than it is for people. Birds that eat an inadequate diet will develop health
problems which could be fatal if not corrected in time. And this is no Chicken Little alarmism, it’s
a fact supported by research and documented by animal health
professionals. All avian health
professionals agree that the number one problem with pet birds nowadays is
malnutrition. Research done by avian
vets came up with the following figure for major nutrient deficiencies in USA
pet birds:
Calcium 98% ... Vitamin D 97% ... Vitamin A 67% ... Vitamin E 27%
And, although, for
certain species, pellets are healthier than seeds, there is no single
commercial food that covers all their dietary needs regardless of the
manufacturer’s claims on the package or the impressive list of all the vitamins
and minerals they might contain. For one
thing, we don’t know if those proportions are healthy for them and, for
another, almost all ingredients in them are not part of their natural diet. Things like soy, for example. There is no soy in the natural diet of any
of our pet bird species. There are very
few avian species that have such specialized diets that they eat only a handful
of things and none of them are kept as pets. And, lastly, birds get tired of always eating the same thing. All birds
require a large variety of food for a healthy life.
As to what their
specific diet should be, one thing to always keep in mind is that species have
evolved to be able to thrive in the particular habitat they live in, and almost
all of our companion bird species come from tropical, subtropical or temperate
climates where vegetation abound. Even
the few species we keep that originated in arid areas always stay close to
water sources surrounded by vegetation. This tells us that a very large if not the
biggest part of their diet is fresh plant material: buds, leaves, flowers, grasses, fruits, branches,
etc. It provides them with vitamins,
minerals, enzymes and fiber. A much
smaller part of their diet consists of grains, seeds and legumes. Some species consume nuts as well, and others
insects and/or worms. These foods
provide protein and are mostly consumed during breeding season. But, in nature, protein in large
concentrations is only found in meat and none of our pet bird species is a
predator or a carrion eater. They like
and will gladly eat meat but it’s not part of their natural diet. We know this not only from observation of the
birds in their natural habitat but also by analyzing the shape of their
beaks: psittacines have beaks designed for eating plant material, nuts and grains, while
passerines and columbines have beaks meant to eat seeds, greens and
fruits. And, while some seeds and
legumes have a high content of protein, they are just not that abundant in the
wild so we can gather from this information that, in general, psittacines need a lot of fresh produce and relatively low
protein. It is, therefore, safe to
free-feed seeds to passerines and columbines (which are natural seed eaters)
but never to psittacines (which are not). A parrot that is free-fed seeds or pellets
will consume too much protein which, in the long run, will destroy its liver
and kidneys.
Birds will choose to eat only what they know and like. In the wild, the parents will feed the babies
the same foods they were taught to eat by their parents. This food is what is available in their
natural habitat and will perfectly fulfill all their needs as the species
evolved to thrive on it. Our birds are
bred in captivity and learn to eat what we humans think is good… or cheap… or
easy. I am sure there are breeders who
are conscientious aviculturists and bird lovers who provide their hatchlings
with a wide variety of healthy food but, in my personal experience, the
greatest majority of them wean to seeds because it’s easy, fast and very
cheap. A bird that never ate a vegetable
or a fruit before will not want to try it. And, even the ones that were raised with an adequate diet, if allowed to
choose, will end up eating three or four favorite things over and over, and
this will be, most likely, food that is too rich in protein or sugar. Malnutrition comes in many different forms
and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the bird guardians do not love the bird or
are not willing to put the money, time and work into feeding it a proper diet,
it’s often due to the owners not knowing what the bird needs to eat to stay
healthy. And I personally believe that
most birds end up with nutritional deficiencies because its owners spoil it. The same way that a mother would not allow a
toddler to choose his food, a bird guardian should not allow a bird to eat only
what he likes. When it comes to birds,
guardians need to exercise ‘tough love’ and force them to eat right.
Now,
as to what constitutes a good diet… We might not know
as much as we need to but we do have some clues. I have always found that canaries, finches,
cardinals, doves, pigeons, etc are fairly easy to keep well fed. By the shape of their beak we know they are
natural seed eaters and, even the most recalcitrant of them will eventually try
a new green or fruit if we insist long enough. The problem eaters are always and without exception the psittacines and, as they happen to be the ones with the
most complex diets, I will devote the biggest part of this piece to them.
Now,
I am sure that most bird guardians will look at this diet and think to
themselves that there is no way they will ever get their bird to follow it but
the idea is to know what the best diet is and try to get as close to it as
possible. It takes time, it takes
patience, it takes persistence, it takes work and it takes a lot of creativity
but there is always room for improvement and that’s what we need to aim
for. Every new green, veggie or fruit
that you incorporate into your regular bird’s diet, it’s another step in the
right direction.
30% OF TOTAL DIET SHOULD BE GREENS.
Most psittacines we keep as pets fall within the category of ‘non-specialized canopy
eaters’. This means that their natural
diet would consist mostly of vegetable material and, ideally, at least a third
of it should be leafy greens. Green is
the color of chlorophyll, the solar energy trapper in plants that makes all
life on Earth possible. And the leaves
are the biochemical guts of the plant where all the essential amino acids,
fatty acids, vitamins, and carbohydrates are manufactured in the first place. This makes leafy greens one of the richest
sources of nutrients in the vegetable kingdom. The darker the green color, the more nutritious they are. And, the more greens the bird eats, the
healthier he’ll be. The best greens to
feed are of a dark color such as collard greens, kale, spinach, beet,
dandelion, Swiss chard, water cress, turnip, and romaine. Let’s look at collard greens benefits, for
example: they are an excellent source of
vitamins A, C and E, manganese, folate, dietary
fiber, and calcium. In addition,
collard greens are a very good source of potassium, vitamin B1, B2, B5 and B6,
magnesium, protein, omega-3 fatty acids, niacin, zinc, phosphorous, selenium
and iron. Isn’t that a dandy of a
green?! One word of caution about greens
high in oxates (kale, spinach, collard greens, etc)
which inhibit calcium absorption, you cannot just offer them these all the time
because they are ‘better’ than others. A
wide variety of greens needs to be consumed so as to reduce the possibility of
health problems. They should also be
given raw, as much as possible, and avoid combining them with fruits that have
a high acidity content (like citrus). (Please refer to our list of greens in
Appendix A).
20% of TOTAL diet should be vegetables
Veggies are
nutrient dense. The nutrient content of different types varies
considerably. With the exception of pulses, vegetables provide little protein
and fat but they contain water soluble vitamins like vitamin B and C,
fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A and D, and phytonutrients, health building substances
which provide all kinds of health benefits to those who consume them. And even though
they also contain carbohydrates, they pack a lot of nutrition into a
minimum of calories. Half a cup of
vegetables would amount to not more, on average, than 35 calories and even
those few calories hardly count because of this neat little biochemical quirk
that only veggies enjoy: the body uses almost as many calories to digest
vegetables as there are in the vegetables in the first place, and the leftover calories don't even
have a fighting chance of being stored in a fat cell. Taking
into consideration that one of the biggest problems with our birds is obesity,
this ‘quirk’ is very useful to us. Now, most of the food we refer to as vegetables are actually fruits,
like tomatoes and cucumbers, grain like corn, etc. and even legumes as all the
snap beans varieties and that’s because vegetables is not a scientific but a
culinary term but we will refer to them as vegetables here. Now, take tomatoes, for example. Tomatoes are reported to contain around 4,000 phytonutrients, plant chemicals which pack powerful health
properties. In addition to having a powerful antioxidant profile, a tomato
stores a lot of other good stuff in 26 calories: fiber, vitamin A and C, a
little protein, a bit of vitamin B6, riboflavin, niacin, and even a pinch of
the minerals: zinc, iron, magnesium, manganese, and copper. It is even low in
sodium and high in potassium. Always try to provide a range of colors as each color carries
a different set of nutrients. (Please refer to our list of vegetables in Appendix B). Within this category, we should also
included edible flowers like squash, pumpkin, day lilies, dandelions, marigolds, hibiscus, chamomile, etc. (Please refer to Appendix C for our list of
edible flowers).
20% of total diet should be fresh FRUITS
‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ we were
told when children, and truer words have yet to be written in terms of
nutrition for birds. Fruits are not just
sugar and water as we used to think years ago. They are full of vitamins and phytonutrients. The best fruits are those where the
color extends throughout the 
fruit like
berries, which contain the most nutritional benefit. But to continue using the example of apples,
although I don’t give them to my birds every day, they do get them very often
because apples are rich in fiber and low in calories; they are full of pectin,
which is not only an excellent digestion aid but also lowers cholesterol; they
help stabilize blood sugar; have anti-cancer properties from all the
antioxidants and, very important for parrots, they have quercetin,
which has anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor properties, repairs small blood
vessel damage and it blocks an enzyme that allows the accumulation of sorbitol, linked to kidney damage and high uric acid
levels. And to put the icing on the
cake, they have vitamins, as well! Plus,
birds love fruits. I have yet to meet a
bird which does not like apples, red papayas, grapes or cherries. But don’t stop with these four, the more
variety your bird eats, the better for him. There is such a huge smorgasbord of them available nowadays and every
single one should be offered to your bird. And just because a fruit is not palatable to us, it does not mean that
it will not be to them. For one thing,
all our fruits have been in one way or another engineered to be more succulent,
sweeter, bigger and better colored to the point that they resemble only vaguely
their wild ancestors. Birds in the wild
eat all kinds of fruits that humans would never even consider eating. I have a couple of birds that eat fresh
cranberries (very good for their kidneys, always a weak point for pet birds)
and I don’t know a single human being who finds them tasty. (Please refer to Appendix D for our list of
fruits).
15%
OF TOTAL DIET SHOULD BE TUBERS, LEGUMES AND GRAINS
The function of
this category is to provide fiber for digestion and complex carbohydrates for
energy but they are also quite starchy and can contribute to obesity in captive
birds, thus the low percentage of them in the diet. Free flying birds that don’t live in cages
can have a bit more than that. The
guardian would have to determine the quantity they can eat based on how active
the bird is.
Tubers are actually
enlarged underground stems used by the plant as storage. They are also called root vegetables and some
examples are potatoes, yams, yucca, water chestnuts, malanga,
etc. They should all be given to the
birds thoroughly cooked, whether boiled or baked in the skin and offered
sparingly due to their high starch content and because, in reality, they are
not part of the natural diet of any pet bird (there are very few species of
birds that actually dig in the ground to eat tubers).
The notable exception
in this category is the sweet potato which is one of the best vegetables in
terms of avian nutrition and can be fed in larger quantities. They are an excellent source of protein,
fiber, beta carotene, vitamin C, folate and calcium.
Some people give them raw to their birds (my birds will only eat them cooked,
though). Please note that yams are not
the same as sweet potatoes; yams come from Africa instead of South America, and
they don’t have the same nutritional value. Try giving them all-red, blue and purple
potatoes for a change of pace. Please
refer to Appendix E for a list of edible
tubers.
Legumes (also known as pulses)
are dry fruits that develop in a pod, like peas, beans, lentils and peanuts
(this is correct, peanuts are not nuts, they are legumes which pods never open
up on their own). They are rich in fiber
and iron but they are also high in protein. That is the reason why they need to be given sparingly and some of them
not at all, like the soybean. Soybeans
are not only not part of the natural diet of any of our pet bird species, they are not part of any known bird’s natural
diet. They have a very high protein content ( a no-no
for any bird food); a chemical that mimics very closely the effect of estrogen
(a feminine hormone –not the healthiest thing for a bird!); the highest levels
of all legumes of phytic acid (an anti-nutrient that
it’s believed to block the absorption of certain minerals, including magnesium,
calcium, iron and zinc); digestive enzyme-inhibitors (the body needs beneficial
enzymes to properly process food); hemagglutinin (a
clot-promoting substance which causes red blood cells to clump together and not
be able to properly absorb oxygen for distribution to the body's tissues); and
they also have one of the highest percentages of contamination by pesticides of
any of the foods we eat. New Zealand
parrot breeders reported a high incidence of infertility, goiter, beak and bone
deformities, immune system deficiency and early sexual maturation in birds fed
soy products. I do not recommend giving
soy beans or any product made with soy to birds. Please refer to Appendix F for a list of legumes.
The name grain comes from a latin word (granum)
which means seed. And that is what
grains are, seeds or fruits (as in the case of corn) that normally but not
always come from grasses. Commercially,
there are whole grains and processed grains (as in rolled oats or flour) but
for avian diet purposes, it’s best to use only whole because in their ‘natural’
form, whole grains are "packages" of nutrients, phyto-protective
components and fiber which, together, work far better than one of them alone or
even all of them consumed separately. Whole grains are also called berries or groats. They are high in fiber and nutrients, low in
fat and very inexpensive. Examples of
grains are wheat, oat, spelt and all rices. Whole grains contain fiber, B-vitamins,
vitamin E, phytonutrients, magnesium, and selenium,
which may offer antioxidant protection and help lower blood cholesterol
levels. They are good for
cardio-vascular health, stabilizing blood sugar and insulin levels, and overall
digestive health but grains are low in the amino acids lysine and methionine which are necessary for good health (quinoa being
the exception and why it should always be fed to birds). Please refer to our Appendix G for a list of grains.
10%
OF TOTAL DIET SHOULD BE NUTS AND/OR SEEDS
And here comes
the difficult part for most bird guardians. Only ten percent?! How could it be only ten percent when most
of the commercial bird diets touted as ‘complete’ out there are mostly all
seeds and nuts? The answer to this
question is anybody’s guess but I suspect it has to do with the fact that most
avian diets are based on chicken nutrition or the diets of species of birds
that have been kept as pets for hundreds of years like canaries, finches and
cardinals, all of them natural seed eaters. The pet parrot boom is a relatively new phenomenon and, most likely,
manufacturers rushed to put together a product they could sell without actually
doing a whole lot of research about it. It could also have to do with what provides the largest amount of
returns on investments: seeds are very cheap when bought in bulk and can be
resold for many, many times their cost. Seeds and nuts are also the easiest product to package and market, they are self-contained and have a long shelf
life. Let’s face it, a diet that
consists mostly of fresh plant material is very hard to package and ship and would
have an incredibly short shelf life which would make the products very
expensive. And birds do love those
seeds!
Seeds are not bad per se and there are many
different kinds. Flower seeds are
usually higher in oil (sunflower, safflower, hemp, rape, etc), while cereal
seeds (canary grass, millet, palmer grass) are lower, most of them are usually
put under the ‘grain’ category and
that’s where we’ll deal with them. In
this chapter, we will cover only flower seeds although we are including canary
seed and millet for practical purposes and I remind you that this piece is not
meant for natural seed eaters as finches, canaries, cardinals, doves, etc but
for psittacines which are not, never have been and
never will be natural seed eaters. Seeds
are a reliable source of protein and, as a treat or a small part of their diet
they are acceptable. Parrots in the wild
consume seed on a regular basis but the seeds they eat are not that abundant
and they are mostly green. A green seed
is a seed that is not quite mature and still inside a fruit. This is not the kind of seed found in
commercial bird seed mixes. It’s the
all-seed or the mostly-seed diet that are killers. The excess of protein destroys their livers
and kidneys and create all kinds of health problems derived from malnutrition:
obesity, vitamin deficiencies, fatty liver, gout, rickets, goiter, anemia,
respiratory infections, sinusitis, seizures and egg-binding to name a few. One of the most popular seeds for parrots
are sunflowers and while unsalted, human grade can be used sparingly as a treat
or a training tool, as a staple, they are much too high in fat (47 to 49%!) and
deficient in lysine, which is essential for plumage development. Depending on the species, this ten percent
could be increased to fifteen or even twenty (for granivores like cockatiels or other birds during breeding season), used only as treats (eclectus) or never be fed (lorikeets and lorries). Please refer to our Appendix H for a list of seeds.
Nuts, on the other hand, if fed
in a measured manner, are not bad at all for the simple reason that although
they are also high in fat, they are bad cholesterol-free and contain
unsaturated fats for a healthy cardio-vascular system. Nuts also provide magnesium, which helps
maintain bone structure; and chromium, which helps to ensure proper insulin
function. And, as they are
nutrient-dense, birds feel full with a lesser quantity.
They contain
zinc for growth and wound healing, and manganese, which protects against free
radicals. All nuts are a good source of
vitamin E, an important antioxidant and, like all plant foods, they are high in
fiber and phytochemicals—both of which help protect
against cancer and other chronic diseases. The nuts category encompasses some foods that aren't true nuts but have
been given honorary status due to their similar nutritional qualities like the
Brazil nut, and the cashew (both technically seeds). Please refer to our Appendix I for a list of nuts.
5%
OF TOTAL DIET SHOULD BE ANIMAL PROTEIN
Animal protein
includes eggs, worms, larvae and meat. Examples are hard-boiled or scrambled
eggs, egg biscuits, wax moth and lesser bee moth larvae, earthworms, mulberry
silk worms, night-crawlers and chicken legs. Mealworms are too high in fat while low in protein so they are not
recommended. Beef and pork should never
be offered due to their high cholesterol and fat content. And, all worms and insects should be
acquired from commercial, reputable sources, never from one’s own garden or
backyard. For one thing one never knows
what they have been exposed to in terms of chemicals and, for another, they
could be harboring bacteria.
Although protein
is not the only benefit of these foods because worms and larvae also have calcium,
phosphorus and carbohydrates, in truth, they are mostly protein and, as all our
pet birds get too much protein to begin with, this percentage needs to be
adjusted very carefully and on a bird-by-bird basis taking into consideration
not only the species but also the level of activity the bird has. Personally, I only feed my psittacines a very, very small portion of hard boiled or
scrambled egg once a month in the winter and twice a month during breeding
season and, if scrambled, always with a
green chopped in it. I never feed any larva
or worms, I couldn’t stand the thought of an animal being eaten alive. And they get a small chicken leg bone, with
the meat all stripped out, once a year for their birthday which is celebrated
for everybody on the same day. Some of
them love them, some will not touch them.
This
concludes the first part of our Avian Diet. We hope you found it useful. There will be a second piece where we will deal with supplements; cooked
versus raw food; packaged food like pellets, strategies to convert a seed-junkie,
recipes, etc.
Written
by: Beatriz Cazeneuve
;)
