If you love your parakeet, then you want him to have a long and happy life by your side. Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion and ignorance about what makes a cheap diet healthy. And, as we all know, a balanced and nutritious diet is essential to stay healthy.
When you’re a new budgie owner, it’s easy to get the impression that all a budgie needs is birdseed. After all, everyone knows you feed birds seeds, and no one at the pet store will tell you otherwise.
The truth is budgies need the same diet as people to stay healthy. Where we eat wheat, corn, or potatoes, they can have seeds or pellets instead, but they need a good mix of fresh fruits and vegetables, just like we do.
In the wild, parakeets feed almost exclusively on mature grass seeds and wheat germ, but mature seeds have a different nutritional content than fully mature seeds. Green seeds are low in fat and packed with vitamins and minerals, but once they’re ripe, they’re full of fat and low in nutrients.
What makes matters worse is that the seeds lose even more of their nutritional value during transport and storage. Your budgie’s seed mix might say it has added vitamins, but that just means they’re sprinkled on the outside of the seeds, the part your budgie peels before eating.
Without fruits and vegetables to go with their seeds, parakeets will quickly become malnourished and sadly every year many birds die painfully from diseases caused by a simple lack of vitamins.
A slightly healthier alternative to seeds are pellets. Bird food manufacturers have designed these pellets to have the same nutritional content as your parakeet would have in the wild. That’s why many bird experts can be heard fanatically preaching that everyone should trade their birds for pellets.
Granules are certainly healthier than seeds, but they are not a cure-all. A pellet-fed parakeet still needs fresh fruits and vegetables; After all, you wouldn’t just eat breakfast cereal because the manufacturer has added extra vitamins to it; it would not be healthy.
And the truth is that many seed-fed parakeets live long and healthy lives, because their overall diet is well balanced.
When it comes to fruits and vegetables, the deeper the color, the more nutritious they are for your bird. The deep colors of apple peels, broccoli, and spinach mean they’re packed with the good stuff. Apple pulp, grapes, and lettuce, on the other hand, are not as healthy.
It can be difficult to get your parakeet started on its greens, especially if it has been exclusively seed fed for years. But your patience and perseverance will pay off when your pet lives ten or fifteen years, instead of the five years that the average parakeet lives.
If you are having trouble getting your parakeet to eat its greens, you can give it a short-term vitamin supplement. These supplements can be added to your budgie’s water, however budgies that feed on seeds instead of pellets don’t drink too much as they get their water from food.
The lesson to be learned from this is that variety and balance in their diet are essential to your parakeet’s well-being, just as they are to yours.