Weight

My quaker was heavier at 10 weeks old than he is now.he seems healthy and eats well..droppings look good..anybody know why he or she would thin out this was back on Dec 1..that he was 10 weeks old?

Hi, I don't have a Quaker nor a lot of experience with parrots but did quite a bit of worrying over weight for nothing with my Grey. A couple of questions, do you know his actual weight when he was 10 weeks and his weight now? How old is your guy? Sometimes they look heavier or lighter depending on their feathers. When we're talking about weight in grams it's really hard to look and tell. Also, I'm wondering if it's a growing bird (young) maybe it used energy for growth and not weight gain. Someone with experience will come around soon. Relax, if all seems well, it probably is.

He or she has lost about a half ounce since I've had him which was Thanksgiving time until now but seems healthy playful .going through a slight molt now

Chasing the weight of a Parrot will drive you nuts unless you follow a very specific process.

Weight is taken daily
Weight is taken first thing in the Morning, after your Parrot's Morning Movement and before its first meal, i.e. the Parrot is empty.
The weight is written down: date, time, and weight.
Weight is taken in grams, which is the standard and allows you to compare with weight ranges for your species.
General monitoring of what your Parrot is doing and eating each day

If you do not follow the above, you will drive yourself nuts because your numbers will be all over the place and as a result will be useless.

Enjoy!

I can tell you that my blue male Quaker who I brought home from his breeder at 8 weeks old, has definitely lost weight or "thinned out" over the past year (he will be 1 year old the first week of April). Even though he's getting to be an adult bird that is taller and wider than he was as a baby, and has a larger head, beak, and wings, and longer legs than he did as a baby, he is most definitely much thinner and I'm willing to bet he has actually lost a bit of weight. This sounds ridiculous, a 10-month old bird weighing less than he did at 8 weeks old and the bird being a very healthy and happy bird, but my guy was a really fat, round baby Quaker! In fact I was really glad he was the baby that picked me out by flying right to me when the breeder let all three blue babies out of their cage. I didn't care about sex but I wanted a blue Quaker instead of a green (green Quakers tend to be larger than other color mutations, there are exceptions to this obviously but I was torn because I wanted a blue one but also wanted as big a baby as I could find). And when I walked in and saw the blue babies in person they were definitely larger than they looked in the photos the breeder had been sending me over the prior 5 weeks. But my boy stuck out, I mean he was just a little porker!!! He was so round and lumpy, he was just adorable, and I wanted him! But I typically let the baby birds investigate me and choose the one that seems to like me the most and that wants attention from me the most. Luckily the little fatty flew right to me and I brought him home. He has his yearly well-birdy checkup with my avian vet next month so I'm very interested to see what his weight is compared to his weight that was taken at my avian vet the week I brought him home at the age of 8 weeks. I'm going to assume that he either weighs close to the same or less! But he's completely healthy, he had blood work, fecal smears, and x-rays last June and he was perfect, and he's a very happy, active bird. So why has he gotten so much thinner as his body has matured and gotten taller, wider, and more mature?

I attribute it to 2 changes I made when I brought him home. #1 is that his breeder had weaned the babies onto a cheap, high fat and low protein seed mix, like the kind you buy at Walmart in a huge bulk bag. His bowl was filled up to the top with the seed mix every morning and he ate as much as he wanted. She gave me an entire new 5lb bag of this food for free so that I could transition him onto whatever diet I wanted to, which I thought was very, very kind of her to do (most breeders give you maybe a cup of the bird's food in a little baggie). This Hartz brand seed mix for cockatiels cost like $6 for a 5lb bag at Walmart, so I understand why breeders wean their babies onto it in order to save money, but I swear that stuff had to have been 80% sunflower seeds! They were all you could see throughout the entire bag, and what few other seeds were mixed in with the sunflower seeds were fatty millet seeds. I transitioned my fat little boy onto Zupreem Natural pellets as his staple dry food with 2 tablespoons of a high-quality small parrot seed mix (I used to use Higgins Safflower Fortified mix but about 6 months ago I switched all of my birds except my budgies onto Hagen Tropimix Fortified seed mix, which contains a daily recommended dose of vitamins and minerals, prebiotics and probiotics, DHA, and Omega 3's). So he went from eating as much of the fattening, low protein seed mix as he wanted every day to his diet being made up of a high protein, low fat, fortified natural pellet that also contains no added sugar (60% of his daily diet), a high protein, low fat, fortified seed mix with NO SUNFLOWER SEEDS (10-15% of his daily diet), a large variety of fresh veggies and a very small amount of fresh fruit (20% of his daily diet), and at least one whole-grain food daily, such as whole grain oatmeal, whole grain grits, whole grain bread or birdie bread, or one of the Higgins Worldly Cuisines pouches of whole-grain, oatmeal-like food mixes (5-10% of his daily diet; ALL OF MY BIRDS LOVE THESE HIGGINS WORLDLY CUISINES!). So I think this is the main reason my Quaker has gone from a very round, lumpy, fat little adorable ball of feathers as a baby to a much leaner young adult bird. If you transitioned your Quaker from eating a fattening seed mix as a baby onto a high quality, low fat diet as well, then I'm sure that's part of the reason he has lost weight.

The second reason I think my baby has lost the weight is that I allowed his wings to fully grow in (his breeder told me that she clipped his wings immediately after he fledged). He basically was allowed to fledge and that was it, a couple quick flights to make sure he really did know how to fly and then he was grounded and put in a cage to be sold. I have never clipped his wings, he was so tame, cuddly, and easy to train that I just let his wings grow right in (luckily she had only cut a few of his primary flight feathers on both wings). So he went from basically being completely sedentary as a young baby, locked in a cage 24/7 until I brought him home at 8 weeks old, to being out of his cage for many hours a day, playing with me and my other birds, climbing all over everything, spending hours each day climbing on, swinging on, and having a blast on the massive PVC bird gym I built my birds that takes up an entire room, and eventually having free flight all over my house. His wings grew back in 2-3 months, so he's been flying all he wants since the age of 4-5 months old, and getting a ton of day exercise since 8 weeks old. So even though as he's grown up he has gotten taller, wider, and just larger in general, his body has gotten much thinner and he has shed most of his body fat. I don't know if your bird flies, but this is a major exercise for birds that builds muscle and keeps them trim.

So that's my theory. Think about how fat and pudgy human babies are for the first couple of years! They too "lose the baby fat". And I'm sure puberty with the hormonal changes it brings along with it has an impact on not only their body weight, but also their entire body structure and general shape.

The bottom line is that bird's bodies change as they age, just as most all living creature's bodies change as they age. It's not at all uncommon for infants and juveniles to be very pudgy and have a lot of fat mass to their bodies. As their bodies grow and get taller, hormones change, and their lives change in a multitude of ways such as a change in diet, amount of exercise, etc., they can become much thinner and actually weigh less than they did as a very young baby, just as easily as they can gain weight if their lifestyles go instead in a negative direction.

All that matters is that your bird is at a HEALTHY weight for his species, age, and general body size. If he is eating a high-quality, varied diet that consists of not only a dry staple food but also plenty of fresh veggies, fruits, and whole grains, he is active and happy, gets 12-14 hours of sleep each night, and gets at the very least a few hours of interaction time with you each day, I guarantee he will be at a weight that is healthy for him. While it's a very good practice to weigh your birds either daily or weekly and to write his weight in grams down in a log so that you will immediately see any SUDDEN weight loss in spite of him eating normally, which may indicate an illness or health problem and allow you to catch it early, it's not necessary to be concerned about his weight as an adult compared to his weight as a very young baby. He should have by now (at a year old or so) established what I call a "Set Point", or a weight (in grams) that he is typically within + or - 15 grams of at any given time (with small birds the variation in their set point can actually be up to + or - 20 grams). If his weight goes + or - 15 to 20 grams away from his set point, then he may have actually lost or gained body weight, instead of just fluctuations in weight due to body water, fecal content, stomach or crop content, etc. If this weight loss or gain of + or - 15-20 grams away from his normal set point is sudden and was not planned, this may indicate an issue, whether it be an illness, change in diet, etc.

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