I read online that only pellets is bad for birds but i ordered these pellets from lafebers and the lafebers company says you can give them as the whole diet instead of seeds. Is this true? Is this safe? I wouldn't stop feeding my conure seeds but I'm just curious if this is true because lafebers seems like a trusted company.
http://www.amazon.com/Lafeber-Company-P ... dp_product

Whatever we feed our birds is basically guesswork since nobody knows exactly what their nutritional needs are, and feeding a diet of 100% pellets is a more educated guess than what most of us could come up with on our own. Pellet formulas have been refined over the years and are less likely to cause problems now than they were 20-30 years ago. Feeding a diet of nothing but pellets is probably as safe as anything else you could feed, because with any diet there's a risk that long term problems will occur.

I don't recommend a diet of 100% pellets though because there are other factors to consider besides the nutrient balance. Wild birds forage on a wide variety of foods and there is psychological/enrichment value in serving a variety of foods in captivity, especially if at least some of it is offered foraging style. A diet of nothing but pellets is pretty boring, and their foraging potential is pretty limited too. You can wrap them up in paper for the bird to tear apart, but "real" food has a lot more scope for creative presentation.

Serving several different brands of pellets also helps to provide variety since the bird can pick and choose between them. I think my birds have about 8 different brands right now lol. Nutriberries are the favorite by a wide margin but they eat the others too. They also have access to vegetables and all the seed they want, plus other foods like sprouted grains.

I recently wrote a big article on pellets if you'd like a more in-depth look at the issue: http://www.littlefeatheredbuddies.com/i ... llets.html It got rave reviews from the Feeding Feathers bird nutrition group lol.

No they can get liver disease and other things and there would be too much protein in a all pellet diet.Ive never tried lafebers but somebody on a different forum told me they dont trust that company.I used to feed Rocko and Loki pellets but I dont anymore I feed them veg for breakfast and seed later in the day I also have other healthy things they like but its not in their diet like they dont get it everyday.Tiko gets pellets and seed and veg and fruit and when shes good she gets nuts.

Ok. Thank you both!

Can seeds expire? I have the Higgins supreme cockatiel seed that I bought it bulk. I got it last November. It wasn't refrigerated until last week. Is it bad?

I offer my birds a mixture of 50/50 seeds and pellets on a daily basis.

I offer them the same amount every day but do take all 'leftovers' away before giving them a fresh bowl of food. (sometimes I just add the contents, but not very often)

Once or twice a week I go in and spend extra time with them (like an extra hour) I use that time to hang up millet or offer it from my hands.

During spring and summertime I also provide them vegetables from my own garden, that insures me there are no pesticides used. The vegy's I offer vary, but mostly it's the surplus or overgrown crops from late harvest. When there are blossoms on my vegetables, arugula for instance is now blossoming, I give them that aswell. When I don't weed out the flowers my garden would be infested with this salad...

Leftover seeds from within my aviary are not wasted. I feed those to the chickens in their coop.

Normaly seeds can be stored for very long periods of time. They do devaluate in nutritional value.
If you really want to be selective you could put some in water overnight and try to grow them in some dirt. As long as they sprout, they have sufficient nutritional value. If not, you might want to switch out and buy a smaller bag next time.

Seeds can go bad. One way to check their quality is to sprout some of them. If less than 50% germinate they're past their prime.

It's an all seed diet that frequently leads to liver disease, not pellets. It's really a malnutrition issue not something directly caused by the seeds themselves. The usual pattern is that birds eat excessive amounts of seed trying to get nutrients that aren't plentiful in seed, which leads to fat buildup in the liver.

Pellets aren't expected to cause malnutrition problems, but too many pellets can cause kidney disease in sensitive individuals when pellets are 90% or more of the diet. The cure for it is to lay off pellets for a while and then add pellets back to the diet at a lower percentage, according to Chapter 16 at this link: http://avianmedicine.net/publication_ca ... -medicine/

Pellets don't contain excessive amounts of protein since they have been formulated to provide an appropriate amount that is not too much or too little. There's an acceptable range of values and the protein and fat content varies between brands. A study on cockatiels found that they could live on a diet of 70% protein for 11 months without any problems. http://jn.nutrition.org/content/131/7/2014.short The study was probably intended to find out how much protein was too much but they never did find the upper limit lol. The protein percent in pellets is nowhere near that. Most regular pellets have protein in the 12-15% range.

If you prefer for the protein and/or fat percentage to be higher or lower than average, you can compare brands and pick the one whose numbers you like best. My article has a chart showing the protein and fat percentages for several brands, and you can compare any other brand to this to see whether it's in line.

Lafeber is an excellent company. The original Dr Lafeber invented pellets to deal with the terrible malnutrition problems he saw in his patients back in the 1970s, and now his son (also an avian vet) runs the company. The company continues to do research into bird nutrition and other issues. http://lafeber.com/our-story/

People who are emotionally attached to certain ideas about nutrition tend to dislike Lafeber because it's not organic, it contains a small amount of sugar, and it uses artificial preservatives. If you've read my article you know that NONE of this is actually meaningful. Organic and conventional are basically equal in terms of nutritional value and safety. The amount of sugar is small and doesn't have a significant effect on the glycemic load or anything else. The preservatives are safe, and eating them is far better than eating food that went bad because preservatives weren't used.

Also they cant get everything from an all pellet diet so they would have to eat other things too.

Actually the major brands of pellets were formulated to be nutritionally complete, meaning that they contain balanced amounts of every nutrient that birds are known to need. But nutritional completeness is a goal not a reality because we can't know the precise nutritional needs of any individual bird. Pellets aren't going to hit the target precisely, but when we feed other foods in addition to pellets we can't tell whether we're making things better or worse. More often than not it's probably going to be worse, because we don't know what we're doing lol.

The most knowledgeable people that I talk to generally prefer to have pellets be about 50% of the diet, with the rest being healthy natural foods like vegetables, fruit, seed, etc. This level seems to do a pretty decent job of covering the nutritional bases, while still leaving lots of room for variety and foraging.

I prefer to just feed veggies rather than pellets that way I can see what my birds are eating.Also I think feeding pellets and seed is ok.

Vegetables are a great healthy food, and including them in the diet is a huge improvement over feeding only seeds. But it's basically impossible to come anywhere close to the ideal balance this way unless you're a nutritionist or have a mash recipe where somebody has done the work of figuring out what it takes to achieve a good balance. For example seeds plus veggies isn't going to have enough protein unless the veggies include a significant amount of beans. The calcium will probably be deficient too. You simply aren't going to get any vitamin D3 or B12 this way because these vitamins aren't available from plant foods.

A study by Donald Brightsmith (he's famous for studying the parrot clay licks in South America) found that a diet of 25% pellets, 25% seed and 50% vegetables and fruits contained too much fat and was deficient in calcium, sodium and iron. It was probably deficient in other things too like protein, but they only tested for certain items. http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1647/2011-025R.1 I was pretty shocked at these results. The pellets alone would have covered a significant percentage of the needs, and I would have thought that such a large amount of vegetables would have covered the rest of the mineral needs. But it didn't.