General Feeding Tips

Feeding

If you are not sure of how much seed to give your bird daily, a heaped teaspoon per day per bird will give you a good starting point, and evaluate what is left in the dish and adjust accordingly.

A good basic mix of 50% canary seed, 25% white millet and 25% Japanese millet is a good start, which you can alter to suit your own situation, some other seeds that can be added are, sunflower, oats, or groats. There are more, but these will be quite sufficient to keep your birds very well.

Many breeders are in the habit of reclaiming or cleaning seed by winnowing it.

"This is a process of removing the rubbish from leftover seed by means of sifting or blowing air over it"

If you use a pre- mixed seed be very aware that the birds have most likely taken more of one type of seed out of the mix, and the re-cleaned seed you are returning to your bins will more than likely be deficient in one or more types of seed.

It is a good habit to top up the mixture to retain that balance.

As an alternative to the birds usual diet, try placing a measure of your usual bird mix in a old stocking, and soak in boiling hot water in a bucket for an hour. Leave this to dry out for 24 hours, and as it starts to germinate, give it to the birds, they will love it, by the way, take notice of the dirty water in the bucket.

Grit is a debated topic in the aviaries, but we like to give our birds the options of many things to eat, so the grit we use is a mixture from different sources, and includes shell grit our club obtains from an inland lake, added to commercial pigeon grit and coarse sea sand that we obtain up on our local beaches, plus a mix we get from Broken Hill, which is a by product of the mines , the mix is 1/4 part of each.

It is a good idea to procure all of your own ingredients for your grit mixture, find a nice balance and keep it freshly supplied to your birds.

Greenfeed is a very important item in the diet. Spinach, silver beet or English lavender is very good, chickweed is excellent, and another item we use is Lemna.

Any green feed fed to your birds should be thoroughly washed before you give it to them. Suspend it from the wire using a plastic clothes peg if possible, and they will enjoy it more. There is an article on Lemna on our site

Seed Storage.

A useful addition to the bird room is a obsolete chest freezer.

Remove the power cords and clean thoroughly inside and out.

If you want to divide it into sections for different seeds, it is not hard to do, panel board cut to size works well. A small bag of naphthalene flakes taped to the lid will keep seed fresh and lice or mite at bay, the top of the freezer is also an ideal work bench in the bird room.

Information from Geoff & Marilyn Lowe