Complete Psittacine Encourage Foraging Activity

Up-to-date parrot keepers hear a lot about ‘foraging’ and ‘foraging skills’ these days. That is not really surprising as for decades much emphasis in bird keeping has been placed upon improving, that is, enriching the environments of our pet and breeder psittacines, along with offering them a full range of mental stimuli to keep them busy.

- EB Cravens

April and I certainly do our owners’ part to help our parrots expand foraging possibilities in our aviaries. We bring in green browse and chewing materials, offer ripe garden and vacant lot seed heads, provide toys and objects that test dexterity and manipulative talents, especially in young or formerly neglected birds we have adopted.

Yet, there is one area in which I like to stress foraging that is not often highlighted by behaviour experts in written articles or online talk groups. That is the fact that foraging can become a well-defined part of a hookbill’s life every single day at his or her own feeding dish!

Our food bowls are a challenge for our parrots, an adventure, so to speak, with things to encounter, items hidden or unexpected, titbits not seen for weeks and favourite items mixed in with more common and ordinary greenstuffs and live vegetable matter.

For the first part, each of our some nine or ten feeding bowls, servicing about twice as many psittacines, is not the same as one another. Years of keeping and maintaining parrot pairs and pets has taught me that most birds eat slightly differently depending upon species, preferences, even prejudices, based upon former compulsory nutritional diets. Why in the world would I keep offering extruded pellets ‘en masse’ to a duo of aging Yellow-fronted Amazons that were previously forced to eat 80 per cent pellets, hence detest even the sight of those rainbow things? It appears to be both a waste of birdie kibble and money, and nothing but an ongoing food fare acceptance battle with two of my beloved adopted flock.

So Kermit and Charli do not get more than five or six pellets sprinkled on their wet, soaked and cooked food every meal, something that keeps me without guilt for offering, and keeps them with lots of other more preferential diet to occupy their nutritional needs.