Wild parakeets living in a hostile environment have been known to live for 25 years. The average life span in our pet parakeets is 10 years. This should cause us to raise our eye brows and come to an abrupt halt asking why. One of the major factors is our determination to continue to feed nutritonally unsound diets. Many pet birds die at a young age from malnutrition or from diseases that are secondary to malnutrition.
What Does the Wild Parakeet Eat?
Parakeets and other members of the parrot family are foragers in the wild. They will eat whatever happens to be in season or is available. Their diet includes
An all-seed diet is neither natural nor nutritious for birds. Seeds are very high in fat (especially sunflower, safflower, and peanuts), low in calcium, low in protein, and almost devoid of any vitamins. The tradition of feeding seed-only diets to pet birds began years ago when wild birds were first caught and imported to our country. Feeding all seed diets was easy and due to the lack of information about the nutritional requirements of birds at that time, the habit became an ingrained practice. With these improper diets, birds will quickly develop malnutrition and a compromised health status
Proper Diets
Offering our birds different food substance once or twice, and then saying that they will not eat these food substance when the birds failed to eat these new foods is not acceptable. In fact, even trying for a month or two and stopping is still not acceptable.You must train your bird to eat these new food substances.
