Tips for Budgies and cockatiels who refuse anything but millet and seeds?

[truelove]

K, so here it is. My budgies and cockatiels refuse any thing other than millet, honey sticks and seeds. They like crackers and other things of that nature, but I have been trying to get them on a healthy vegetable diet. I place it there, and they look at it like So any good suggestions that will work?

[nvranemptynest]

My 'tiels will only eat veggies in the form of ground-up mash with seeds sprinkled over it. They look at anything left in its natural state as though it were poison. Good luck finding the form your birds will accept!

[Monica]

Try Kitchen Sink or Birdy Bread
Lissa's Kitchen Sink Rice and Beans
Top Bird Food Recipe: Kitchen Sink

Adding sprouts or their regular seed mix (small amount) to the mix may help get the birds going through the mix...

You can also take 3-6 different types of veggies, maybe 1-3 types of fruits, and add them to a corn bread mix.

Birds like variety, so it's a good idea to mix 3-6 (at least) types of foods together and offer them.... try chopped, diced, sliced, cooked, raw, steamed, etc. Offer the fresh foods first thing in the morning for 2 hours with NOTHING ELSE!!!! After two hours, take the food out and put in their regular food. Repeat each day.

Here's a great site on the nutrition information on foods of any type (including fast foods)
NutritionData.com NutritionData's Nutrition Facts Calorie Counter

Here's a list of foods that can be fed (although not complete) from the Healthy Bird Cookbook by Robin Deutsch.

Grains, Breads, and Muffins
Corn bread
Graham crackers
Mandel bread, soaked
Matzoh
Matzoh balls
Mini bagels
Oatmeal
Pastas
Rice
Rice cakes
Rice Chex
Rice Krispies
Sweetened corn cereals
Sweetened oat cereals
Toasted bread
Unsalted crackers
Unsalted, unbuttered popcorn
Wheat cereals
Whole-wheat or multigrained bread
Zweibach toast, soaked
Other grains

Vegetables
Beans
Beets
Broccoli
Carrots
Corn
Green beans
Jalapeno peppers
Lima beans
Mixed vegetables
Okra
Peas
Potatoes
Summer squash
Sweet Potatoes
Winter squash
Yams

Fruit
Apples
Bananas
Berries (all kind)
Grapes
Kiwis
Mangos
Melons
Oranges
Papaya
Pears
Star Fruit
Winter Squash
Yams

Other Foods
Hulled seeds
Millet spray
Monkey biscuits
Peanut butter sandwiches rolled in millet
Pellets
Scrambled eggs
Hard-boiled eggs
Sprouted seeds


Foods to avoid
Chocolate
Avocados
Sugar (too much is a bad thing... best kind is natural sugars)
Old Seeds
Mayonnaise products
Unwashed Fruits or Vegetables
Rhubarb (contains oxalic acid, as does spinach - feed only in small amounts)
Fruit Pits
Nuts (brazil nuts, almonds, imported nuts that have been polished/dyed)
Dairy Products (birds are lactose intolerent-feed small amounts-cleaned/cooked eggs and yogurt fine)
Mold
Caffeine
Salt
Alcohol
Food Dyes
Sulfites (found in dried fruits and veggies to help preserve them-only from health food store)

[tielfan]

Here’s how I got my tiels to start eating a better diet, and it would probably work just as well for budgies. I got a special food cup and put a small amount of their very favorite treats in it, along with some new foods I wanted them to try. At first they mostly ate the treats but eventually started eating some of the new foods too. It helps if you can half-bury the treats under the new food so they have to touch the new food to get at the treat.

It helps if the new foods don’t look too different from the seed diet they’re used to. To get them used to moist foods I gave them some cooked whole grains (from the local natural-foods grocery) then switched over to sprouted seeds and grains. Sprouts are easy to make and are an excellent source of nutrition. They’re best when the root is just barely starting to emerge, and they still look a lot like a seed at this point. Since sprouts are already moist, they’re a good vehicle for red palm oil and other supplements that you can add just before you feed them.

I also taught my birds to take treats from my hand and sometimes offered new foods this way. Sometimes they wouldn’t take the new food, but sometimes they would! This is how they learned to eat pellets, and they still prefer to take pellets from my hand instead of eating them from a dish.

With fruits and veggies it pays to experiment with the presentation. Some birds like stuff cut up in chunks in a bowl and others like it some other way. My birds mostly prefer their veggies whole and hanging up. They prefer certain shapes too. In the wild, cockatiels eat a lot of seed and also chew on the stems of grass and other plants to extract the juices. My birds like vegetables that resemble either a seed or a stem. They don’t like big broad leaves, and cutting big leaves into thin strips doesn’t fool them.

Their very favorite ‘vegetable’ is lawn grass (chemical free of course). Unripe seed heads are a definite plus. We humans can’t digest it but it’s part of the birds’ wild diet so I think it’s great. They like ‘stemmy’ or narrow-leaved vegetables like thin asparagus, dandelion greens, carrot tops, green beans, and cilantro. They also like seed-like vegetables: corn kernels, peas, broccoli (the florets look like unripe seed heads).