What to Feed a Pet Bird (Seed Is Not Enough)

The budgie mix on the shelf is mostly millet and sunflower. It's cheap, birds love it, and a bird raised on it alone will very likely develop fatty liver disease, respiratory infections from vitamin A deficiency, or calcium problems.

It persists because birds eat it enthusiastically and appear fine for years, right up until they aren't.

Why seed alone fails

Seeds are high in fat and low in almost everything else. The specific gaps that cause problems:

• Vitamin A. Deficiency damages the lining of the respiratory tract, which is why chronic sniffles and repeated infections are so common in seed-fed birds.
• Calcium. Matters enormously in laying females, where deficiency causes egg binding, a genuine emergency.
• Amino acids, particularly lysine and methionine, which affect feather quality. Poor feather condition on a seed diet is common.
• Too much fat. Fatty liver disease is widespread in seed-fed budgies and cockatiels and often only found at post-mortem.

What a good diet looks like

Fresh food goes in the morning and comes out after a few hours. Vegetables spoil fast in a warm room, and spoiled food causes its own problems.

Converting a seed addict

This is the hard part, and it needs doing carefully. Birds do not recognise unfamiliar items as food, and a bird will genuinely starve in front of a bowl of pellets it doesn't understand.

1. 1Week 1: mix a small proportion of pellets into the usual seed. The bird will ignore them. That's expected.
2. 2Week 2–3: raise the pellet proportion gradually. Eat something similar in front of the bird, because birds are intensely social feeders and will try what a flockmate eats.
3. 3Week 3–4: offer seed only at set times, twice a day for about half an hour, with pellets available the rest of the time.
4. 4Week 4+: reduce the seed windows. Keep weighing daily throughout.

Some birds convert in a fortnight. Some take months. Cockatiels are notoriously stubborn about it.

For vegetables, presentation matters more than the vegetable. Clipped to the bars at perch height gets eaten; the same food in a bowl on the floor gets ignored. Chopped small and mixed into something familiar works. So does hanging it like a toy, because a bird investigating something is a bird that may eat it.

What's dangerous

• Avocado. Genuinely toxic to birds, more so than to dogs. No part of it.
• Chocolate and caffeine. Birds are small, so dangerous doses are tiny.
• Apple pips, and cherry, peach and plum stones. Cyanogenic compounds. The flesh is fine.
• Salt. Birds have very low tolerance. No crisps, no salted nuts, nothing from your plate.
• Onion and garlic. Damages red blood cells.
• Alcohol. Obvious, and worth stating.

Water

Fresh daily, and change it more often than that if the bird bathes in it or drops food in. Bacteria multiply fast in a warm room.

Skip the vitamin drops sold to go in the water unless a vet has told you to use them. They encourage bacterial growth, most birds drink less when the water tastes odd, and on a proper diet they're unnecessary.

The short version: pellets as the base, vegetables every day, seed as a treat, and convert slowly with the scales out. It's the single biggest thing you can do for a bird's lifespan.