Our dry food blend.

I may have mentioned this before, but I make a custom dry food blend for my birds. I thought it may be fun to see what everyone feeds their birds.

My "custom" blend consists of Zupreem Avian Natural pellets in the Cockatiel size, Alta Loma Seed Company custom Cockatiel seed blend with dried fruit, dried multi-colored pasta, popped millet cereal and raisins.

I started doing this, too, when I realized the expensive blend I was buying for Scooter was just seeds and ZuPreem anyway, and Scotty came eating the store's pellet and other stuff blend. I vary mine a bit every time I make it, both to keep them from getting too stuck on any one thing and to try and find what they eat best. I'll take photos if I get a chance later, but Scotty's has several types of pellets, pasta, pistachios, unsweetened dried fruit, cinnamon and star anise. Scooter has safflower seed, red millet, oat groats, ZuPreem Wild & Spicy, pasta, dried chiles and T.O.P pellets in the smallest size. He mostly picks out the safflower...

I don't do dry mixes, if I did that, both of my birds would pick out their favourites and leave the rest untouched.

GlassOnion wrote:

I don't do dry mixes, if I did that, both of my birds would pick out their favourites and leave the rest untouched.

I try to feed it at a quantity that they do that first, but are still hungry enough to explore the "dregs". This works very well with Scotty who prefers pellets to fresh food and not so well with Scooter who just eats a ton of fresh food.

ScooterNScotty wrote:

I started doing this, too, when I realized the expensive blend I was buying for Scooter was just seeds and ZuPreem anyway, and Scotty came eating the store's pellet and other stuff blend. I vary mine a bit every time I make it, both to keep them from getting too stuck on any one thing and to try and find what they eat best. I'll take photos if I get a chance later, but Scotty's has several types of pellets, pasta, pistachios, unsweetened dried fruit, cinnamon and star anise. Scooter has safflower seed, red millet, oat groats, ZuPreem Wild & Spicy, pasta, dried chiles and T.O.P pellets in the smallest size. He mostly picks out the safflower...

I premix the pellets and seeds, but I add other stuff as I have it available. I usually alternate between dried oatmeal, dried chiles, Just Hot Veggies dried veggies, rice and spices as I have them available. Cheney Bird eats the pellets out of his pellet dish, but I've never seen him eat the pellets in his dry mix. He usually picks out the dried fruit and veggies, sunflower seeds and safflower seeds.

I've been considering finishing off the dry mix I have made already and then using the Zupreem and seed mix to blend with TOPs and Roudybush, eventually getting rid of the Zupreem all together. How does Scooter like the TOPs?

GlassOnion wrote:

I don't do dry mixes, if I did that, both of my birds would pick out their favourites and leave the rest untouched.

The budgies do that, but since Cheney Bird eats out of all four food dishes, nothing really goes to waste. I also don't change out the dry mix every day in most cases and let them finish off what they have available.

As far as I can tell, Scooter is ignoring the TOP pellets, but he just plain isn't keen on the whole pellet thing. I could try to force the issue, but he's good with fresh food, so I haven't. He was well-established on seeds when I got him.

I get a few different mixes and then remix those together.

Basically its: Safflower, sunflower, white millet, red
millet, oat groats, niger, sesame, flax, watergrass, rape, milo, rolled
barley, buckwheat, dried greens, saffron, canary grass seed, dried Papaya, Pinapple, Dates, Raisins, Banana, Coconut, rolled barley, oat groats, rabbit
pellets, whole and cracked corn, dried chili peppers, peanuts,
pumpkin, watermelon and whatever pellets I happened to have bought.

I feed similarly to Kaela and Deb - not so much that they fill themselves on just their favorites.

Our dry blend changes month to month, but here is one I typed up at some point after a mixin'

Harrisons pepper coarse
Harrisons fine
Golden'obles
TOP
quinoa
quinoa/kamut pasta
brown rice pasta
dried hot peppers
eucalyptus
dandelion
star anise
coconut flakes
cinnamon chips
strawberries
bananas
raspberries
milk thistle
winter wheat berries
toasted barley
oat groats
millet
sesame seeds
dried spicy veggie mix (corn/carrots/peas/tomatoe​s)
various organic plain cereals with no additives (puffed kamut, puffed corn, shredded wheat)
goji berries
chamomile flowers
various seed type blends that vary month to month