hard to find advice on

Birds

Diet beyond seed, feather problems, and cage setup.

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BirdsNate14d agoWhat toy or foraging setup has actually held your bird's attention?Most bird toys get ignored within a day. The ones that don't are worth knowing about, and the homemade ones especially. What has kept yours busy for more than a week?0 repliesNo vet yet
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BirdsPawsRx Team14d agoDid you convert your bird off seed, or are you still working on it?This is one of the slowest things in bird keeping and everyone's method is a little different. What you switched to, roughly how long it took, and whether it actually held. Still trying is a perfectly good answer. Plenty of people are.0 repliesNo vet yet
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BirdsMichael15d agoBuy a gram scale. Best 15 dollars you will spend on a bird.Birds are prey animals and they're extremely good at acting fine. In the wild, looking sick gets you eaten, so the instinct is to hide it right up until they physically can't anymore. By the time a bird is fluffed up on the floor of the cage with its tail bobbing on every breath, that's not early illness. That's very late, and it's an emergency. Weight is what gives it away first, and it moves days or weeks before anything else looks wrong. You can't see it under feathers and you won't feel it picking them up. So: a kitchen gram scale with a flat top or a perch, weigh in the morning before they eat, write the number down. Same time, same conditions, every time. Once you've got two weeks of normal, a change jumps out immediately. The scale matters because a few grams is a lot at this size. A cockatiel around 100 grams losing 10 percent has lost 10 grams, and there's no version of you catching that by eye. While we're here, the diet half of the same problem. All seed diets are still incredibly common and the damage is slow rather than dramatic. Seeds run high in fat and low in a lot of what a parrot needs, and vitamin A deficiency is the classic result. It shows up as crusty or swollen nares, white plaques inside the mouth, bad feather quality, and a bird that gets one sinus or respiratory infection after another. Sunflower seeds and peanuts are the worst of it because birds pick those out first and fill up on them. Most avian vets want pellets as the base with vegetables and a smaller amount of seed on top. Converting a committed seed eater is slow and you do it while watching the scale, which is another reason to own one. Don't just swap the bowl and hope. Birds will genuinely starve rather than eat something they don't recognize as food.0 repliesNo vet yet
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BirdsPawsRx Team15d agoThe most common way people accidentally kill a pet bird is in the kitchenIf you have a bird and nonstick cookware in the same house, this is the one to read. Birds don't breathe the way we do. They have air sacs running through the body in addition to lungs, and air moves through the system in one direction, which makes their gas exchange incredibly efficient. Great for flying at altitude. It also means anything airborne hits them far harder and far faster than it hits you. Overheated PTFE, the coating on traditional nonstick pans and what people mean when they say Teflon, gives off fumes you won't smell or feel at all. Birds die from it in minutes, often with no warning signs first. The breakdown happens at high heat, roughly above 500 F, which an empty pan preheating on a burner hits very easily. It's not just pans, and this is the part that gets people who already threw out the pans. The same or similar coatings turn up on self cleaning oven interiors during the clean cycle, on some space heaters, irons and ironing board covers, hair dryers, air fryers, waffle irons, drip pans, and heat lamps. The self cleaning oven cycle has killed a lot of birds specifically because nobody connects the two. The fix is removal, not ventilation. Get PTFE cookware out of the house and use stainless, cast iron or ceramic. If for some reason you can't, the bird goes in a different room behind a closed door with a window open, and you never run a self cleaning cycle with a bird in the home at all. Since you're auditing anyway: avocado, chocolate, caffeine, alcohol, salt and onion are all toxic to birds. So are aerosol sprays, scented candles, plug in air fresheners, and smoke of any kind. Birds and plug in air fresheners do not mix.0 repliesNo vet yet

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