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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Fri Jan 29, 2016 8:23 pm 
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Name: Carolyn
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I think the main appeal with the fruit blend is the different colors and in some cases the different shapes. My guys started out with the fruit blend but eventually the natural became their favorite.



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2020 4:18 am 
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Hi. My budgie is only a few months old and I noticed she is spurning everything from her seed mix and eating the millet only. Every day she'd demolish some greens, but she started to not touch that too. She started showing signs of attention seeking, for me to replace the seed when it was full. She had thoroughly dug through the bowl and found the ones she liked.
So I decided to try to get her onto pellets. Im not quite there yet. Ive got all this budgie food, I can't get her to eat. I got her onto egg and biscuit powder, which you mix to a paste and budgie crumbles. Not eating the pellets yet. Her poop is quite loose now. Im wondering if this is something permanent. If I can get her to eat the pellets will it stay loose looking?



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2020 4:23 am 
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I havent been able to tempt her with apples carrots or anything like that, despite trying different shapes and sizes. Eating it in front of her, ect



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2020 10:06 am 
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Be careful to make sure that she gets enough to eat! Too much egg and biscuit isn't good, it's mostly a breeding food. It's OK to have some millet in the diet but she does need more than that. Can you get Nutriberries? They're nutritionally equivalent to pellets, but they look like seed balls. So it's easier to convince birds to eat it.



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2020 9:46 pm 
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Ive not seen that one. Our supermarkets just have seed. There is still seed in the cage, minus the millet, but I had to make sure she was eating something. While I try to get her to eat the pellets, the crumble and biscuit was all she was eating. I bought a seed stick that has pellets and millet stuck together, as a treat. Not sure how I can get her to realize all the things in the cage are food, that shes turning her beak up at. All previous birds were fed seed mix and I never had problems with cherry picking millet before and refusing everything else



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2020 9:53 pm 
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She used to eat all the seed in the bowl, in a few short weeks, she turned into a millet fiend. When you separate the seed, there is only a teaspoon of millet in the bowl vs everything else. So she was starting to starve herself to try and get millet only. Update. I put the treat stick on her cage, that she would have killed me for, two days ago and turned her beak up at it. Put her outside on it. She took one bite and rushed back into the cage. She's eating the bird crumbles instead. Theres crushed pellets in there too.



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2020 7:08 am 
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This is very odd. In the short run, the most important thing is to make sure that she gets enough calories, but in the long run she needs to have a well-balanced diet to stay healthy. I think my inclination at this point would be to keep a millet spray in the cage (or offer it outside the cage) in addition to her regular food, and just let her pig out on millet for a couple of weeks to see if she gets over it. It's possible that this is a phase, and she's mainly going millet crazy because the supply is limited. If she doesn't get over it, it's time to start limiting the choices again.

In the meantime, also hang up some greens in a way that invites her to shred them, even if she doesn't actually eat it. Or put them over the millet spray so she has to go through the greens to get the millet, and hope that touching leads to eating.



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2020 12:19 pm 
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Id make myself a sandwich and give her spinach every day. She was going crazy for the greens. Im going to try my trick of putting it in front of her mirror, so she will have to bite it off to see herself today. I was wary of adding millet, as I thought she might go back to eating that only and refusing everything else. Its been about a week since I started trying to change her diet. I have 5 different varieties of bird food. She was extremely efficient at targetting one item. She got in the seed bowl digging and throwing all the other unwanted seed out of the bowl. At first I thought she was being messy until I realized what she was actually doing. She would then make this persistent tweet noise, start rushing to the front of the cage, every time she saw me. Shes not made that sound again. Shes flapping in the cage, holding onto the perch, doing flying, not flying exercise. Not huddled up in a big ball of feathers. So she looks well and active. Apart from the weird poop, she looks normal. I read they will drink more water on pellets as its dryer. It is very damp.



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Wed May 06, 2020 3:11 pm 
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She sounds like she's healthy, and if you put her favorite food where it's easy to reach she won't make such a mess trying to get to it. Then hopefully she'll go eat something else when she's had enough of that. Having food in several different places turns it into sort of a foraging activity, where they have to travel around to get some of everything.

It takes a long time to see the effects of a bad diet, so keep an eye on her to make sure she's eating more than just millet as her long term diet. But in the meantime you can use tricks like putting greens where she doesn't want them to encourage her to grab them with her beak. Touching can lead to eating!

Keep on encouraging her to eat the pellets, because seeds in general don't provide enough protein for the amount of calories and pellets will help balance this out. I taught my birds to eat pellets by holding their favorite treats between my fingers for them to eat, and every now and then I'd slip them a pellet this way. At first they would spit it out with a disgusted look on their face, but eventually they started eating it.



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 Post subject: Re: Converting to Pellets
PostPosted: Thu May 07, 2020 10:27 pm 
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Name: Bluefire
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Dont worry. Ive seen the disgusted look and digging past food and ignoring it.
"Clearly she's hiding real food amongst all this rubbish I got to dig past!" Shed look at me and swipe at the uneaten seed, "LOOK, THERES NOTHING BUT THIS RUBBISH TO EAT! I WANT MILLET!" I got her to nibble on some apple today, then I had my sandwich and she come to my side of the cage, practically accusing me of holding out, when clearly I had something better! It had avocado on it, so I wasnt inclined to share.



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