A Healthy Balanced diet for your Parrot
 

_____________________________________________________________________ Cornbread, Boiled Dried Beans, and Sprouts:                         Page 4
__________________________________________________________________________

Dried beans and grains should be boiled up and mixed. Add cooked pasta (e.g. pasta rice). Freeze these in 2 or 3 day portions per baggie. Warm up a days portion and add cooked sweet potato, butternut or other vegetable. Flavour with chilli powder.
 

This is a good body filler type food, and hook bills soon love the this "comfort" type food.  Birdie bread (Super Corn Bread) may be made, and crumbled up and fed  as required.

Sprouts are very nutritious.
These should be "home made" to ensure the seeds are well cleaned, and the sprouts fresh. Within a few hours of sprouting the seeds have converted much of the oil/fat content to protein.

Beans, and/or Corn Bread and/or sprouts comprise about 25% of the days food.     (Recipe for Basic Corn Bread)

Copyright 2004 ParrotBits

Mixed seeds may be provided to fill in the last 5% of the diet. Most larger parrots will favour sunflower seeds. These may be given as "treat" food, or as part of the 5%. Sunflower is a very oily seed, which increases the fat content of the diet, and is also not very high in essential food elements.

Information contained here is a guideline, is not intended to be prescriptive, or exclusive.

Other treat foods would be almonds, grapes, litchis, raisins. Any companion parrot that has been on a seed only diet for some time will need to be converted to a balanced diet over a period of time. It has taken as long as three years to convert an African Grey breeding pair to pellets. It takes patience, patience and more patience and perseverance.

There is nothing as determined as an African Grey who will not eat what it does not want. It will rather die of hunger. These birds must be treated with love and respect, and the move to pellets may be very slow,