I've posted here before and yall are so helpful but here's a bit of a back story: We got our budgie (Chichi) when he was about four weeks old. He was tiny and still had pinfeathers (I live in Japan and this is supposed to be normal practice here for selling birds
). He got tame really fast and when the baby food was finished he switched to eating the adult food... or so we thought. A little over a month ago he started vomiting up seeds. We rushed him to the vet who said he hadn't been eating enough and was underweight, put him on meds and gave us special food to feed him (a powder you add hot water to). We were giving it to him every three hours for a few weeks and when he was better slowly changed to three times a day. We were monitoring his weight and as of a few days ago he was 27 grams before eating.
Fast forward to yesterday morning, I got up early for work and saw that the poop on the bottom of his cage was greenish, liquidy, and had a kind of sour smell. Chichi ate when I offered him the baby food, and then acted kind of lethargic, just sitting on my finger and closing his eyes when normally in the morning he's running all over the place.
We took him back to the vet who told us to put him back on the same medication as before, keep feeding him three times a day, and gave us some roundybush pellets to crush up and offer him. We crushed them up and put them in the same little bowl we usually put the baby food in. Chichi rushed over thinking it was the liquid food, saw the crushed up brown stuff, puffed up his head and started squawking up at me like "What the ---- are you trying to feed me?!"
Last night we took the seed cup out of his cage and replaced it with the pellets but this morning his crop was empty and it looked like he'd hardly touched them. I tried to give him 1/2 crushed pellets and 1/2 baby food mixed together and got the exact same "What the?!" reaction as before. Smart little bird.
So how can I outsmart him? I left a dish with the pellets in his cage and did see him pecking at them but don't know how much he really ate. He will eat seeds and spray millet but definitely prefers the liquid baby food over everything else. When he's hungry - instead of just eating what's in his cage - he'll start whistling loudly and jumping around to get our attention until we give him the baby food.
While he's on the meds feeding him three times a day is okay because we just mix the meds in with the food. But when the meds are done I think it's high time he started eating by himself. Any advice would be much appreciated.