- Hey everybody, Jamieleigh from BirdTricks here
and I'm here with a special guest.
Many of you have seen her on the channel already
with her blue and gold macaw named Tango
and foot-checking Woodrow.
(laughing)
She actually has two blue and gold macaws
and if you haven't seen her playlist, her playlist is Tango.
And she is one of our free flight students.
So check her out on our channel if you haven't already.
Ashlyn is here to help me with a little project
because she started doing some
of our customer service emails
and we are getting some of the same question.
And she was like, "Hey, Jamie,
"you really need to film a video on this."
(laughing)
- Really need to, for sure.
- So you may be wondering
what are we filming this video about?
Now, we get tons of questions
about our Natural Feeding System.
Those of you that are not familiar with it,
it is my Natural Feeding System Cookbooks.
It's a set of three cookbooks, but the main premise of this
is our seasonal feeding system
in our main book that dictates, goes by the seasons so that
you're feeding your bird as close to nature as possible.
Now, what many of you noticed is we don't tell you how much
to feed your bird.
And there's a reason for that. (laughing)
Not only does feeding your bird vary species to species,
but also bird to bird.
Ashlyn actually has a great example with her two birds.
- Yeah, so I have two blue and golds
as she mentioned before, Tango and Woodrow.
And Tango is about two-years-old and is a freestyle flyer.
And so he's very, very active.
Whereas Woodrow's in her 20s,
unfortunately has some arthritis due to past dietary issues.
She just doesn't fly.
Both of them are about the same size.
Both of them are about the same weight
and yet Tango eats three times as much as Woodrow does.
I mean, it's incredible.
And I can even put that food in Woodrow's bowl
and she still won't eat it.
It won't get touched.
So it's not even just about the species of bird
that you have, it's about the individual bird
and their lifestyle.
- Yeah, so this comes into play so much.
And as a lot of guys see
in our parrot training consultations playlist
every bird is so different.
We've seen small African greys to large African greys
and the same from species to species.
So this is why we don't put out a this amount of food
works for every single bird
because there is no one size fits all
when it comes to feeding.
So what we are gonna do is give you the tools
and the formula that you need to figure out
how much to feed your bird.
Please keep in mind this will vary bird to bird.
I can't stress that enough--
- Yeah, it's gonna vary a lot from bird to bird.
And this is a starting point.
So if you need to change it and tweak it a little bit
for your bird, feel free to do so.
This is just our recommendation.
- So a little different take on this video.
I'm actually gonna pass the reins off to Ashlyn
and let her teach her this formula that we taught her.
She explained it back to me
better than we originally taught it to her.
So I thought who better to tell you guys
how to implement this than a student who learned from us.
- Yeah, I'm really excited to show you guys.
I just got my birds just a little over a year ago now
and I was completely lost on this and this is what helped me
get through this transitional time in our lives.
So as we just talked about,
I have two blue and gold macaws, Tango and Woodrow,
who eat completely different amounts of food.
And when I first got them, I had no idea what to feed,
how much to feed.
I mean, Woodrow was on an all-seed diet,
Tango was on a diet of dried fruits and pizza crusts.
I mean, it was craziness.
So I understand when people write into me saying,
hey, I'm switching over
to this amazing nutritional feeding system
but how much am I supposed to feed?
And this is what Jamie and Dave taught me.
And it's something where it does require a little bit
of work on your part, but in the end it is so worth it.
There are a lot of reasons why you don't wanna over
or underfeed your bird.
The first is health.
If you're overfeeding your bird and your bird is one
that'll just eat and eat and eat and eat,
it's gonna get overweight.
And that's gonna cause a lot of problems with their health.
It's gonna cause problems with fatty liver, hypolipidosis.
I mean, it's a whole list of things
that could possibly happen.
And in Woodrow's case,
it actually caused arthritis pretty early on in her life.
The other reason is with training motivation.
So you never wanna starve your bird, ever.
There are times in the day that they are naturally hungrier.
And that's right before breakfast and right before dinner.
However, if they're just eating like crazy,
there's never gonna be that time that's an optimal time
for you to go ahead and work with them
and have them be motivated for training.
And the third is cost.
I don't know if you guys are in the same boat as me,
but I just don't have dollars to be throwing everywhere
with their food.
And every time I would throw away fresh food
I felt like I was just throwing away money in the trash.
So it's really great, too, to be saving on your wallet
and make sure that they're getting as much as they need
without it being excessive.
So first off, just like anything in training,
you wanna make sure you are setting yourself up
for success with this.
So the first thing you wanna do is you wanna make sure
that you have 12 hours overnight
that your bird has not eaten anything
to get this first reading.
So you wanna feed them their normal organic pellets
in the evening, have it be a full 12 hours
that they should be sleeping anyway
and then when you wake up, you can go ahead
and start this process.
So not only is it about you getting the bird prepped
for this, it's also about getting yourself prepped.
So I'm gonna show you the things that you need
to get this going.
The first thing you need is a scale.
So this here is our gram scale that we offer.
This is amazing for weighing your birds.
If you haven't checked it out, go check out our scale
on birdtricksstore.com.
So other than a scale, what you're gonna need
is you're gonna need your pellets,
which we of course have our healthy organic pellets.
These are fantastic, my birds love them.
They're also great for so many uses.
Seriously, go and check out the pellets.
Go check out the video that explains everything
that can happen with them.
And then last is the Natural Feeding System.
This here is our summer recipe.
You can always make a few tweaks to it.
However, this is the main meal you wanna be working
with your birds.
So at this point, what we wanna go ahead and do
is get a base weight of food.
Now, for most birds we're gonna say
for the Natural Feeding System, you wanna start
with about 40 grams of food.
This may seem like a lot.
Now, if you have a budgie or a cockatiel
or something really small, you might wanna go ahead
and start with 20 instead of 40.
But we wanna actually give more than they're gonna eat
because we wanna get a reading
of how much they are actually eating.
Again, starting point.
If your bird gobbles this up, maybe they need more.
But most likely, they're not gonna be able
to eat a whole 40 grams of this food.
What you do is you go ahead and turn on your scale.
Once it's set, go ahead and place your bowl.
You're gonna notice it's gonna go negative.
And you wanna hit the tare button.
This will go ahead and get it reset.
And then you wanna make sure you have
a full 40 grams of food.
So this should be weighed out just right hopefully.
Oh, pretty close. (laughs)
Let's see.
Oh, of course it jumps.
Well anyway, it's around that amount.
So that's all you really need
is somewhere around that amount of food.
- [Jamie] It just keeps going, 40, 41,
40, 41. (laughing)
- Once you have that, you wanna go ahead and place it
in your bird's bowl for breakfast.
Now, most likely your bird will not be able
to eat all of this.
In fact, that's what we're going for.
We wanna give too much more than too little.
Let's say your bird were to eat...
So this is what we started with.
And let's say your bird were to eat that much
and that is what's left.
You wanna go ahead and weigh that back on your scale.
And that's now down to 13 grams.
That means if you do 40 minus 13
they ate a total of 27 grams of food.
So what you wanna do is over the next seven days chart this.
Take the numbers you have and average them.
That is about how much food your bird can eat
to completely fill itself in the morning.
And that's gonna make sure that you don't go too high
or too low.
So next after the Natural Feeding System
is your evening meal of organic pellets.
So we do not recommend 40 grams of pellets to start.
We tried, that is a lot of pellets.
25 grams is something we found between Jamie's birds
and my birds that is way more than any of them eat
and we have very large macaws.
So 25 grams is about where you wanna start.
Again, if you have a very small bird,
you might wanna start more around 15.
But again to show you, you're gonna go ahead
and take your bowl and place it on your scale and hit tare.
And then you wanna go ahead and get about 25 grams, perfect.
That there is the amount you wanna start with.
Once again, after your bird is done eating,
let's say they went ahead and ate this much
and this is what's left, you're gonna go ahead and weigh it.
Six grams.
That means they ate a total of 19 grams.
Again, chart that over the course of seven days
and find an average for your bird.
Also, I do wanna mention
with both the Natural Feeding System and with the pellets,
if you're doing a lot of training
and giving a lot of treats while training,
that can alter these numbers.
So your bird may not be as hungry if it's gotten a ton
of treats during the day versus if you were at work
or just didn't have the time to do some training that day.
They might be eating a bit more.
Always be sure to chart it, always be sure to measure it.
But this should give you a really good idea
of how much your bird needs on a daily basis.
So there's one other thing I do wanna mention
throughout this whole process both with pellets
and the Natural Feeding System is you really should
be weighing your bird on a daily basis if not more.
You really wanna weigh before breakfast and before dinner
to get some accurate weights of where they are.
If you start noticing throughout this process
that your bird's weight spikes,
it could just be that your bird tends
to overeat a little bit and you need to cut back
during the process.
If you notice that your bird's weight tends to dive,
it may be that you need to change up
and add a little bit more to this,
especially if they're eating all of it.
Now, if it's diving and they're not eating all of it,
I would recommend doing more training during the day
to get them some more treats in their diet.
You might wanna go ahead and talk to your vet.
Anytime there's a 10% or more weight loss drop,
we always recommend going and getting your bird checked out
just to make sure that everything is okay.
(upbeat music)
- So I just wanna say a big thank you to Ashlyn
for coming all the way up to Idaho from Florida
to help me film this video and share this information
with you guys that you've been asking for so much.
I was very reluctant to put out this video
because I was like, there is no one size fits all.
And she's like, "I know, let's just give them
"a starting point."
So I'm so glad that you pushed me to do this
and that you helped film this.
And I was going to mention your merch.
I just hadn't got to it yet.
If you want a Touche hoodie, they're in.
He just lost patience with me.
But thank you again, Ashlyn.
- You're welcome, it was seriously my pleasure.
I hope this process really helps you guys moving forward.
I know it helped me and my birds a ton.
So I'm excited.
- Yeah!
Touche, where are you going?
Okay, let's do it. (laughing)
- Touche.