Just as an inadequate diet leads to nutritional and immune deficiencies in humans, a suboptimal diet can leave companion birds susceptible to infectious and noninfectious diseases.
Many parrot owners limit the bird’s diet to seeds or a prepackaged food for birds, believing that the bird will eat the diet and receive sufficient nutrients from the diet. These assumptions are not necessarily true.
It is equally incorrect to allow the parrot a free choice of food over the course of a day. It can make it difficult to note whether the bird is eating. Anorexia in a bird may be doubly difficult to detect because any high-fat bird diet leads to a bird in apparently good shape, while the bird may be suffering from its nutritionally deficient diet.
When planning a diet for your parrot, you should remember the preferred diet of the Puerto Rican parrot. According to one definitive study, wild Puerto Rican parrots eat fruit, seeds, leaves, tree fruiting structure and bark, as well as canopy vines.
If you want to feed your parrot seeds, limit the seeds and nuts or parrot seed mix to 30% of his total intake. For the rest of the diet, you should provide: 20% vegetables, 20% fruits, and 30% a mixture of rice, grains and legumes. Be sure that you do not include avocado in the diet, because avocado is poisonous to small psittacine birds. You can substitute dairy products for some of the legumes, and you can substitute pelleted psittacine diet for some of the rice and grain mixture.
You should offer food to your parrot at regular intervals. Offer food two or three times per day, leaving the food available for one or two hours at each feeding. Be sure to remove the food for discarding or refrigeration at the end of the feeding period. This schedule will not only make it easy for you to note the quantity and type of food eaten, but it will also help you to bond with your bird (1).
Just as humans tend to eat one type of easily accessible food, such as hamburgers and fries, parrots often become enamored of one food. If your bird has developed a strong preference for a single food, you must expand the nutritional content of his diet to avoid a nutritional deficiency. Unsurprisingly, the difficulty of such a change correlates highly with the age of the parrot. You can win a young bird over to several new foods rather easily, but an older bird may have a deeply ingrained feeding habit to which he is firmly attached.
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