Are Sunflower Seeds Bad for Parrots
Sunflower seeds have earned a bad reputation in the aviculture world. These seeds are labeled as fattening, and often blamed as the leading cause to serious health problems (like Nutritional Disorders, Fatty Liver Disease, Thyroid Dysplasia and Obesity) in parrots.
We often get advises from experienced aviculturists, telling us to avoid feeding sunflower seeds to our parrots, because these are unhealthy and lacks in nutritional value. Are sunflower seeds really bad for parrots?
I decided to find about the nutritional fact of sunflower seeds. I was totally dumb-founded with my findings.
Do you know sunflower seeds are excellent sources of various vitamins and minerals?
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Tags: Bird, Bird Food, Bird Health, Bird Seed, Companion Parrot, Parrot, Parrot Food, Parrot Health & Diet, Pet Bird
What makes Kacy so unique, neither because of her appearance, her special stints nor her unusual habits. It’s because she also has very unusual “exotic” taste buds!
Other than he usual favourites, sunflower, apples and pears, she craves for noodles and bee hoon (also known as rice vermicelli or rice noodles)! That’s definitely very unusual cravings for parrots, even Kermit and Kiki aren’t any die hard fans for noodles or rice vermicelli!
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Tags: Bird, Bird Food, Bird Seed, Companion Parrot, Conure, Kacy, Parrot, Parrot Diet, Parrot Food, Pet Bird, Pyrrhura
What I Hate About Commercial Seed Mixes
Previously I wrote about ethoxyquin found on some of the commercial seed mixes that can posed dangers to parrots’ health. Although there are some commercial seed mixes are free from ethoxyquin, naturally preserved and truly organic, but they still have one thing in common that I hated most.
Sunflower Seeds! Well not the sunflower seeds that rose the hatred but just that commercial seed mixes are flooded with too many sunflower seeds. The picture of the big pack of sunflower seeds, are actually sunflower seeds extracted from 1.5kg of quality commercial seed mixes and I stored them in Zip-lock bags as treats for future training purposes.
Reasonably amount of sunflower seeds can be healthy in providing the required vitamin E and fatty acids that are essential to parrots. Anything that are excessive or too much can be unhealthy. We all know that parrots are programmed to love seeds especially SUNFLOWER seeds. Parrots just “worship” them.
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Tags: Bird Food, Bird Health, Bird Seed, Parrot Diet, Parrot Food, Parrot Health & Diet
Do you read the label of the commercial food for your parrot before buying them? To date, most commercial pet food (including commercial seed mixes and pellets) available in the pet store are preserved with a chemical antioxidant called Ethoxyquin. Are you aware of it?
Some of you might have heard about Ethoxyquin, but many still remain ignorant. They are unaware about it and do not know the adverse effects of it on parrot’s health.
So what is Ethoxyquin?
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Tags: Bird, Bird Food, Bird Health, Bird Seed, Parrot, Parrot Diet, Parrot Food
Lately I received couples of feedbacks and emails asking me what kind of food that I offered Kiki as treats during her training session, and leads me to a decision to write a post on incentive treats. I do hope it will be a useful information to all parrot owners.
First to begin, I need to define what is a treat and make it clear to everybody the purpose of a treat. A treat is something out of the parrot’s daily diet, which means it’s not a common food that he or she can find it his or her food dishes. Next the treat to be simple and small in servings, why? Small servings will not make our feathered friends feel too full, and making them yearning for more! Parrots are like humans, just imagine when you have lots and lots of packs of French Fries at one go, and later on someone offered you another pack. I’m sure you will definitely stop and not go on as you are full and rather sick of French Fries at that very moment.
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Tags: Bird Food, Bird Seed, Parrot Diet, Parrot Food, Parrot Training, Parrot Tricks
Lovebirds are one of the small parrots who really enjoy water bath! My lovebird, Kiki is a clear life example.
She loves playing with water and she enjoys water bath!
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Tags: Agapornis, Bath Bird, Bird, Bird Food, Bird Seed, Bird Video, Companion Parrot, Lovebirds, Parrot, Pet Bird