My Eclectus Refuses Fresh! What do I do?

CCollie

New member
Dec 23, 2019
2
0
I've had my female Eclectus for about 6 months now. She is 4 years old.
Her previous owner said she was given fresh all the time, but everything I offer her (and I've tried everything!) she just throws at the bottom of her cage where it spoils, and I remove it. The only veggie I've gotten her to eat is dried chilli pepper. She loves to snack with me, so I've tried to feed her socially, mix veggies in with the stuff I know she really likes, but it's no use. She looks at me like I'm stupid, and refuses to touch the stuff.
I'm at a loss.
 

chris-md

Well-known member
Feb 6, 2010
4,349
2,119
Maryland - USA
Parrots
Parker - male Eclectus

Aphrodite - red throated conure (RIP)
Keep trying! There are a number of things you can try:

Play with how you prepare each item. Cook it, serve raw, mince it, serve it whole, julienne them, cube them...you’ll find some of the problem is they simply don’t recognize something as food.

Whole carrot? Food! Little orange cube? Wtf is this??

Raw carrot? Too hard. Cooked carrot? Perfect!

Sometimes you have to give them a unique experience. Won’t eat a bell pepper? Put their favorite food inside a bell pepper and make them shred the pepper to get to their food. They have to eat SOME pepper as they shred.

Won’t eat papaya chunks? Take a whole papaya, and let them watch you shove some nuts into it. They’ll shred into it really quickly to get to the nuts. Eventually learning that papaya is delicious and won’t need the nuts int he future.

Won’t eat kiwi chunks? Try round slices! Or just give the whole kiwi for a while.

Also, a tried and true trick is to put some coconut oil or red palm oil in the bowl. That’ll get their beaks down real quick.

Lastly, chop everything up so small that they can’t discriminate and throw stuff out. Run stuff through a food processor. This kind of preparation, fittingly, is called chop. Many of us Ekkie owners (and non Ekkie owners alike!) serve chop mixes to our birds as their base diet.

As a side note, if you haven’t caught on, particularly since you have a female, keep fruits you a minimum. The diet really is vegetables and grains (including sprouts if you can!) with the odd, rare fruit. Excess sugar in the diet triggers hormonal behavior.
 

1oldparroter

Member
Nov 4, 2019
267
7
Waiteville, WV
Parrots
I am 71, married and fairly private. I have PM privileges but prefer the phone. Printed messages, are so limited. jh
Watch video's of people making chop. Like Chris said, size of cut pieces is important. Time it out of fridge and near room temp is important , today's mix, cooked,steamed or raw. Ask the previous owner to give you an example of what they did. Hang fresh this or that in the bars of her cage and cut her ration of what she does eat. Lots of Youtube.com video's and use the search window for parrot veggies, etc. jh
 

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