Seed?..

..for those of you who also supplement seed with your 'zon's nummys..how much do you offer?
Amy has three large bowls,each can hold three cup's of whatever.
One bowl is water,one for seed/treats (nutraberrys/cheerio's/a couple nuts) and his main nummy bowl.
Amy usually uses the seed bowl for late night snacking or if he is p.o.at what's in his main bowl.
Between the seed and berrys etc that bowl is 3/4 full and is changed every other day.
I find I'm tossing a lot of it out the back door for the critters




Jim

Dora has a small portion of seeds, nuts and fruits daily. A lot of her food does go to waste... I'm thinking about sticking to the treats she does accept(consistently) and exploring new treats. She's been playing more lately, which has been fun - as a result, I've been putting treats in various locations to encourage her foraging Crazy for cashews!

We have used the big stainless steel bowls for years, but found them to not allow us to follow what is or is not being eaten as the smaller 1/4 cup stainless steel bowls do. The small cup be really difficult to find and really need to be set in a larger bowl to keep from being dumped.

May seem like a bit of a pain, but as stated above, they work wonderful for locating them in different places to promote foraging.

They also are great to expand their diet interests since they are more likely to accidentally eat something new.

Big surprise, we base the diet around the Segment in the I Love Amazons - ... Thread in the Amazon Forum.

Depending on what foraging toys he has on any given day, Kiwi usually ends up (total) getting a small scoop (like a partially full 1/4 cup scoop) of seed mix. A few times a month, if we're in a hurry or something, he'll get a bowl of seed mix instead of fresh foods. I used to be very concerned about doing that, but have recently been allowing it a little more often, especially since he now eats his veggies and fruits with no big fuss or fight and after conversing with his AV.

Some of you guys might find this interesting actually, as I did- Last vet visit, she asked about his diet and I explained he was on a fresh foods diet and really doing well eating all that healthy food. The vet specifically said he should be eating a little more seeds and nuts every day. Apparently some part of their digestive tract called a "gizzard" can become weakened if they aren't ingesting enough 'hard' foods. As she explained it, in nature they eat tough to digest seeds/nuts of poor nutritional value and the gizzard has extremely powerful muscles in it designed to grind them down and extract nutrition. Not a major concern for pellet eaters since pellets are hard, but for birds on fresh foods diet where most of their food is soft, it was an interesting thing for an AV to note that seeds and nuts are actually important to their digestive health and shouldn't be excluded from their diet to the extent the internet might lead us to believe. Seeds/nuts just shouldn't make up an overwhelming amount of their diet but they do benefit from eating them and aren't going to get fatty liver disease from a little seed mix as part of a varied diet.

I give my Sam Zupreem and Harrison's pellets along with one scoop of a good quality seed mix a day. I only feed enough for one day because he likes to put all of his goodies in that cup, and I don't want any contamination.

He then gets carrot every day (hates sweet potatoes), plus all of the other fruits and veggies rotated throughout the week. He enjoys a piece of walnut or pecan as a treat, and gets milk thistle prescribed by the vet for liver support (he is 34) on two cheerios every morning.

We do share some of our dinner with him, such as brown rice, pasta with tomato sauce and of course pizza! He loves that. I guess he just has a very well rounded and diverse diet. Vet says he is good and healthy.

My Red Lored gets veggies (and a little fruit if we have some) in the morning, around 1-2pm she gets 2 tsp of this seed mix we have, dinner is pellets Harrisons mixed with Roudy BUsh. I save the nuts for training/bribes. Days I know im not going to get around to training I leave some wood chunks in the cage with nuts packed in holes I drilled as tight as possible. Goal is to make her completely destroy them to get the nuts.

She is a bit of a perch potato so everything is weighed and measured out, per the vet. If i get her flying (she can, but doesnt) more then we can see about upping her rations.

Oh my God... nummy bowl.....my new favourite thing

That is all I have to say.