- Hey, everybody, Jamieleigh here from BirdTricks.
And today's video is talking
about what the heck to do when your bird stops eating.
And yes, I had this on a recent consult,
which, of course,
birthed this video idea.
(mellow music)
Okay, so there's a few different perspectives
you could be coming at from my bird stopped eating.
So the first one I wanna tackle
is if your baby bird stopped eating.
If your baby bird is refusing hand feeding,
or is going through a weaning process,
please consult your breeder
and be closely in contact with your breeder.
That is what they do for a living.
So I wanna make sure that you have
not only a vet on your side,
but also you have the resource of your breeder
because they're gonna know best
based on the species and all of that.
So this video isn't pertaining to that predicament.
However, I do have a free download
on how to properly wean a baby bird
if that's what you need help with.
But as far as a baby bird refusing to eat,
that's when a breeder or a vet gets involved to help you,
because you do need somebody hands on.
So the scenario I'm really talking
about is when you already have your bird
on what you could call your ideal diet,
which is hopefully my Seasonal Feeding System
and looks something like this,
so it's super fresh and healthy for your bird.
And then suddenly their appetite changes
and they're just not eating.
And maybe you noticed the weight's going down.
Maybe there's not so much a weight fluctuation
but just an appetite fluctuation,
and we'll talk about that as well.
I do notice that when there's an appetite fluctuation
and the weight doesn't seem to follow,
that is usually hormones talking.
So hormones can really throw us,
because sometimes it looks like illness
or the symptoms are kind of that of illness
where their appetite fluctuates,
sometimes their weight fluctuates,
and their poops definitely look different.
And I know it's weird to talk about your bird's poop,
but it tells you a lot of data,
so it's important in this aspect.
Now the scenario that I'm really tackling today
is when your bird is on an optimal diet,
like my Seasonal Feeding System,
and then you just notice like it's not eating it anymore.
What's going on?
Are we seeing a weight decrease?
What happened?
I have clients that come to me and say this.
And say that everything was going really, really well.
And then suddenly the bird stopped eating
or refused to eat.
And so they went back to offering the old food
out of fear that the bird was gonna starve to death
and they would lose their bird.
So I want this video to really talk to those people,
because there were so many tips and tricks
I had up my sleeve to offer
to get the bird eating again
that had nothing to do with going back
to an old, terrible, unhealthy diet.
So in no way, do you ever wanna go back in reverse
and undo all the great things you did
in acquiring a good diet by offering unhealthy foods.
A lot of the times, if you're just offering
your bird a bowl a seed just to get its weight up,
that's not the proper way to get the weight up on a bird.
You wanna do it in a successful, healthy way
where you're either building muscle
or you're giving really good foods more often
so that they can bulk up.
But you never wanna do it with fatty foods.
Not to say just on its own,
it probably won't even be accurate.
So you wanna go about it a really healthy way.
So I'm gonna give some tips and tricks
on how to get creative with getting your fird.
Getting your fird.
That's bird and food as one word.
Getting your bird to eat well again.
Some of this happens when you're doing
my Seasonal Feeding System
and you jumped from one season
and then you're going to the next season.
I know that some rescues and sanctuaries
that are making giant batches
of my recipes for so many birds,
that they will often combine half of one season
and half of another,
blend it all together,
and that's what they'll give them
to transition into the next season.
So if you find that you need to do something like that,
that's totally okay.
If you find that the beets in one of the recipes
is just making everything pink
and your bird's not into that,
then go with golden beets
because those have a little bit sweeter flavor
and they won't turn your entire batch pink.
So just kind of think outside the box
of what it is that's turning your bird off.
Do you need to incorporate foods that it likes
a little bit more, that are a little bit sweeter?
Bell peppers tend to be on the sweet side,
so most birds are really into that.
Maybe you need to incorporate more of those.
I knew a bird that was obsessed with jalapenos.
And so I had told her owner
to just incorporate lots of jalapenos
to get the bird interested,
and then slowly dwindle back to the appropriate amount.
Things that you need to do temporarily
for transitional periods and for the better good
of your bird's diet in the long-term are totally okay.
Birdie bread is another great one
where birds love the texture of the actual birdie bread
and you can hide a lot of things in there,
especially if you're dealing
with stopping eating from pellets.
There's so many things
you can get creative with with pellets.
So I will say, in my Seasonal Feeding System,
I do have a FAQ for all the things
that people have brought up before.
And stopping eating things,
kind of goes back to all of the fun recipes
that are in there, aside from my seasonal feedings.
So a lot of people don't understand
that the Seasonal Feeding System
is really the ultimate goal.
That's what we want all birds to be on, ideally.
So they're getting their vegetables in their raw form.
They're getting the most nutrients out of their food.
However, all the extra recipes
are really to give either variety to your bird
or to help diet conversion.
So if you're just having a hard time
getting them to eat certain things,
you can use the following recipes
to encourage your bird to explore its food.
Another thing I wanna point out
is there's so many recipes in my book
that are foraging recipes
and were so much fun to serve,
because of the nature of foraging and destruction
and just getting our birds to play with our food.
That is kind of the first step
in getting your bird onto a healthy diet,
is encouraging them to play with their food.
And I know it sounds wasteful, but I promise it's not.
It's all going towards the greater goal.
So here we have these green wraps in my cookbook
and Cressi is going to town on this
pulling all the goodies out from the inside,
and these were all rolled up.
So it's a really, really fun way to serve.
I'll show you guys on the side.
This is some fun ways to serve it.
And there's just some goodies in those wraps
that they can just pull out, destroy, crunch up.
A lot of the birds just loved pulling the leaves apart.
So things like that where you're really getting creative.
One of my favorites is our caterpillar recipe.
It's not real caterpillars, don't worry,
but they're super cute.
So we made these caterpillars
and we've had fun doing
these on our Tasty Tuesdays over on Patreon.
And Capri, and Dave and I, and actually my mother-in-law,
we all made our own versions of our caterpillars.
And then we tested them out to our birds
to see which one they went and destroyed first,
and whichever ones they destroyed that was like the winner.
So these are really fun 'cause it allows
you to get creative with your bird's food
and see what you can make
to get them enticed and get them interested.
Some birds prefer certain textures,
other birds prefer certain temperatures.
So if you need to alter that temporarily
to get your bird back on track,
feel free to do so.
That in no way is gonna harm your bird for the long-term
of just using it as a transitional tool.
One of my clients, who is now the manager
actually of BirdTricks,
had such a hard time converting her bird
that her bird was on birdie bread for over six months
trying to use it as a transitional tool.
Now is that ideal to have your bird
getting birdie bread every single day for six months?
No, not necessarily.
However, she's a free flight student.
We knew that bird was burning off all those calories,
and we knew it was going for the greater good
and the greater purpose of getting her bird on the diet
that it would be on for the rest of its life.
So it's a very minimal price to pay
to get your bird eating healthy.
So I will say, the main things with getting your bird
back to eating is just getting creative.
If you need to change the texture
and make something mushy, go for it.
Of course, be mindful of how that might
play a role in hormones,
but we're talking diet here.
Diet is one of your foundations
and you need to make sure it's the right diet.
So it's worth it in order to get your bird eventually
on the original Seasonal Feeding System.
Wow, talking is not my thing like ever.
I feel like I say that in every video,
and here I am still doing videos.
Another great way to entice your bird
is by taking those fresh foods
and making a fun omelet out of it.
As you can see, my budgie, Visa, at the time,
was loving this omelet.
And omelets are pretty popular at our house,
Dave and Capri eat omelets almost every single morning.
And Blueberry, my budgie, is all about it.
So sometimes just working those fresh foods,
or even pellet powder, into an omelet
is all it takes to get your bird right back on track
and eating healthy foods again.
So keep in mind, some birds love holding food in their feet
and just eating out of their foot.
Patty's entire flock, my friend, Patty,
her entire flock is like this,
where they like to just hold stuff in their feet and eat.
And she has primarily cockatoos,
so totally get it.
So you may wanna consider making your food
into something that can be a foot food.
So these are one of our BT Crumbles,
we call them our BirdTricks Crumbles,
and they're super fun.
The whole thing was kind of making a healthy version
of a Nutri-Berrie,
but basically we were just trying to make a foot food
for a bird to hold and have fun
consuming and breaking apart.
So the cool things about these is that they do crumble,
hence the name BirdTricks Crumbles.
So making something like this might be the gateway
to getting your bird back on track
because it's eating in a way that it desires to eat.
All right, on this page,
Tusa is eating our curly pasta salad.
Now pasta is obviously one of the most loved
carbs by our birds.
And we have to be really mindful
when we're putting carbs into our birds.
Some of my seasonal feeding,
well, one of my seasonal feeding recipes,
calls for pasta until your bird
is 100% eating the seasonal feeding.
And then I say, don't give the pasta in it anymore.
But as an enticement food, it does its job.
It also plays a really big role as a binding ingredient.
So when you toss pasta in a food processor,
it gets up nice and tiny, but it also becomes sticky.
And this means that all the really, really good foods,
like the vegetables and stuff, are sticking to that.
So when the bird wants
to get that really filling piece of pasta,
it can't help but get the nutritious foods along with it.
So pasta can be used as a tool,
which I guess is the whole purpose of this video,
is really looking at food in the ingredient,
in the temperature, in how you serve it,
in the color, all those things as a tool.
So find the things that your bird
is just obsessed with and you know can't steer it wrong,
where you can use that as a tool
to get better eating habits out of your bird.
So I'm gonna give you guys a few more ideas
out of my Seasonal Recipe Feeding Book.
There's tons of ideas.
There's over hundreds of recipes in these books.
You've got to set up three.
You can do them as an instant download on my website
so you have it right now.
Or you can get the physical copies, like I'm showing you,
if you tend to like to hold things in your hands,
especially cookbook form,
we have it spiral bound
so that you can set it against something
and easily open to whatever page you need
and make those recipes.
So here are my friend Patty's cockatiels, Tinky and DD,
going into a foraging cup.
And the cool thing about it,
although we do provide the recipe
of what is in these foraging cups,
you can kind of make up your own too,
and you can get creative
with serving even the Seasonal Feeding System.
So instead of just putting it in a bowl,
you could put it in a forging cup,
you could put it in a bell pepper,
you could put it in part of a pumpkin or a butternut squash.
There's so many different ways.
You could even roll it up in those leaves
that I was showing earlier
where I think it was Swiss chard that we used.
So you can really get creative
in how you serve the food to your bird
and making sure that it's fun
and not getting too boring for them.
Which again is why we change with the seasons,
with our Seasonal Feeding System,
to make sure that they're getting a balanced diet year round
and keep it fresh for them.
Oh, this is a really, really fun one
that we had a lot of fun with.
So we made kebabs.
And I will say, you wanna make sure
that your bird is eating its healthy diet,
but then check out the chart I have
on how often you can feed certain categories of food.
And the ones that don't have any sort
of limitations to them,
you can put on a skewer kebab
and serve in your bird's cage.
And this is so much fun for them to just go at and destroy.
So just make sure,
'cause I tend to see a lot of people
do this with mainly fruit,
try to stay away from doing it with fruit
and stay to really healthy foods.
Okay, so this one kind of goes back
to what I was saying earlier,
where you wanna use foods like pasta or even grains,
'cause most birds,
anything that has carbs in it they're just all about.
So you wanna make sure you're using
those really specifically and not just as freebies.
This is a mini stuffed shell recipe that we have
where we make two different recipes for filling them in.
But as you can see,
this cockatiel was so excited for going for the pasta part.
And this is cool because the recipe inside
is sticking to it,
so eventually this cockatiel
is going to taste that and get a bite of it
and realize the filling is actually the better part.
Ah, I'm gonna end on this one
because I wanna leave a little tribute to Bandit,
'cause I miss him every day.
So this is Bandit enjoying
one of our stuffed bell pepper recipes.
This one was so fun and he was such a good taste tester.
For more recipe ideas,
and just crazy amount of inspiration,
check out my Seasonal Feeding Cookbook.
I'll leave a link in the description.
You do get these other two books as well.
We tried to do really fun,
healthy holiday recipes that are all themed out.
And then we also have a smaller book
that talks about recipes that you can make for yourself.
So they're meant for humans,
but aren't gonna hurt your bird to share
every once in a while,
so that you could do a little social eating there.
But I just wanna stress the fact
that if your bird shows suddenly
a disinterest in healthy foods,
please don't immediately resort back to panic mode
and going and offering what it used to eat,
whether it was an all seed diet or an unhealthy pellet.
Please get creative first
and figure out ways to entice your bird
to eat the good stuff.
Whether you need to change the color,
the temperature, the consistency, the texture,
whatever you need to do,
or use other favorite foods
to entice back in and then slowly wean back.
But please don't just erase all of your productivity
and the leaps and strides that you've made
in getting your bird eat healthy.
Don't just give up that quickly.
There's lots of areas where we can help you.
So please feel free to reach out, info@BirdTricks.com,
and my customer service team is happy to help.
They have all been through the ringer, as I say,
with different experiences with diet conversion.
So some of them had to do
the weaning process all over again,
because they thought they were buying
a completely weaned bird
and then it regressed to hand feeding.
So they had to learn how to wean
and teach a bird to eat vegetables for the first time.
While others have adult birds
that just wouldn't diet convert,
and had to use birdie bread for six months,
and make it from scratch,
and really control what went in it.
So there's just kind of all across the board.
My customer service team has seen it all,
'cause they all started as clients.
And so they understand what you're going through
and are completely happy to help you, as am I.
So if it goes beyond customer service
and you require a one-on-one consult,
I'm always happy to do those.
So make sure that you contact me if that is the case.
But yeah, happy eating, everybody.
Thanks for watching this video.
And leave your tips and tricks of your own
in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching
and please don't forget to subscribe
if you haven't already.
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