- Hey guys, today Blueberry and I are sharing
our recipe for small birds to make
your own human grade seed mix straight at home.
No more commercial ones, right Blue?
Right cute little Blue.
(upbeat music)
All right, I get a lot of questions
based around parrot nutrition,
and normally the focus is on small, medium, and large birds,
but only small birds to about the size of my sun conure's,
since that's what I have in my flock.
But since I recently added my budgie Blueberry,
I've been getting asked a lot more questions
regarding small bird diet,
and especially seed and diet conversion.
A lot of you are totally stuck
on how to convert the small birds onto a healthy diet.
So as most of you know I have a nutritional course,
and this is my main cookbook in that course.
What this course goes over is my natural feeding system,
and what that is, is just as in the wild
with the seasons changing, the food sources would change,
that's what we try to mimic in captivity
by changing your recipes within the seasons.
So whatever is seasonal for you at that time
is what we put into that recipe.
It's super balanced and it makes up for the nutritional loss
of what you're gonna lose when you freeze it.
We have made up for that in what goes into these recipes.
So don't worry about that.
But it is something that you can make
in large batches, freeze, and then thaw as needed
in the portions that you need.
Now, this works great for me because
I have a very large flock.
And when I added Blueberry to my flock,
I realized that small birds really love
that crunchy texture, at least mine does.
So I tend to make smaller batches
or keep smaller quantities of the ingredients on hand
and really make it fresh every three days or so
for this little one.
So one of the things that you can do with diet conversion,
as I know a lot of you feel really crappy
about having your small birds on an all seed diet
because they refuse to eat anything else.
And I feel you on this, they're some of the hardest species
to diet convert over off of seeds.
And since most breeders wean on to seeds because
it's easier, faster, and they can push more birds
out the door, it just kinda sets us owners up
for failure longterm to try to change that
and get them off of it.
So what I'm gonna show you today
is my seasonal feeding system
and my recipe for the seed mix that I give to Blueberry.
So the best thing that you can do,
if you're really struggling hard with diet conversion,
this is if you're small bird won't eat fresh food,
your small bird won't eat or try a pellet,
and you're on the same store-bought seed
as you started your bird with.
This is for you guys (laughing).
So the next best step that you can do,
I wanna make sure that you guys feel like
you're making progress in the respect
of diet with your bird.
So, the best thing that you can do next
is convert from your store-bought crappy commercial seed mix
to an organic human grade seed mix that you make at home.
So I'm gonna show you and share my recipe with you
and what I did with Blueberry
when I brought Blueberry home for the first time
and worked on diet conversion super heavily.
Now, commercial seed mixes have all the dyes in them,
you'll know them straight away
because they tend to have kind of dryer ingredients,
a lot of dust at the bottom,
and just from like brittle ingredients and things like that.
And then of course the colors,
the colorful, colorful colors, and all the dyes in there.
So, the idea is to get from your commercial seed mix
to your organic seed mix.
So you guys will wanna source these ingredients online,
I personally used Amazon because
(laughing) it's super convenient.
And then when everything arrived,
I was able to make my seed mix, no problem.
Okay, so let's get to the actual recipe
and then I will show you how to get your budgie,
or your other small bird, eating this.
So a little variation to my recipe
is you can either use one pound of millet
or you can use a half pound of millet
and a half pound of quinoa as your base.
Then you're gonna add one cup of oat groats.
One cup of hemp seed.
A half cup of brown flax seed, whole.
One cup of chia seed.
One half cup of rapeseed.
And one whole cup of rolled oats.
You're just simply going to mix all of that together.
And it's going to be beautiful,
especially compared to the dyes in commercial seed mixes.
(seed mixture mixing)
It's a huge step up to get from a commercial seed
to an organic human grade seed mix.
So pat yourselves on the back if you make it this far,
and you're able to convert your bird
to at least a healthier version of a seed mix.
Now, how you can use this seed mix
is in more diet conversion techniques.
So you can take my seasonal feeding system,
which I put a little bit in this bowl for Blueberry,
and then I also have my organic seed mix here,
and I would just put a little bit of my seed mix
in with my seasonal feeding and put it all around
and mix it up so that it's sticking to
the seasonal feeding system.
Now, initially yes, your bird is just gonna be going
for the seeds and picking it out.
But while it's doing that, it's going to be trying
the foods that are also sticking there
and it's gonna be getting these new flavors
and learning that it likes and dislikes some of them,
hopefully it likes all of them.
The next trick that I wanna offer you guys
is using some sort of binding ingredient.
Now this is up to you and based on your birds
likes and preferences.
For me, I've used anything from hard boiled eggs,
where I hard boil them, I mash them up,
I even add a little bit of water
just to make them extra sticky and moist,
and then I mix that with my seasonal feeding system.
So now it's binding all those vegetables together
within the egg, then I sprinkle the seed mix into that,
so that it's just a stickier mixture
where everything is really severely binded together
and the bird can't help but get
all that yummy stuff on its beak.
So this is working if your bird looks up
from its food and it has all of it stuck to its face.
That's kind of (laughing) the idea,
is you wanna sort of trick your bird
into trying these foods to realize that they like it.
Another good binding ingredient is sweet potato.
You can puree it, you can also do the same thing
with boiled carrots or steamed carrots.
Anything that you can get into that texture
is really ideal.
You just wanna get something that is sticking
and holding everything together.
I know some people who have used Greek yogurt
and things of that such.
There's a lot more ideas in this book
if you guys wanna refer to that,
or come up with your own, it's really up to you.
You just wanna try to get the ultimate success
with your bird trying new foods,
'cause the more it tries new foods,
the more open it'll be to try more and more new foods
and realizing that he likes it.
Your presence is requested.
Can you show everybody how yummy homemade seed mix is?
(seeds crunching)
I also wanna point out, I know that small bird,
like I said before, a small species of parrots
are really hard to convert in diet.
And I don't want you guys to think
that my nutrition system is not for the small birds,
'cause it actually is.
I had two white budgies at the time
that I produced this and with my friend, Patty,
who had cockatiels at the time,
and so they are featured throughout this book.
Let me try to bring up a photo of them.
There's one of my budgies (laughing).
So, there's a lot of variety.
We had Libby the Quaker,
Theo the Goffins, lot of variety in here,
and we do show taste testing on small birds.
So I don't want you guys to feel like
this is only a medium to large bird system.
This is for all species of parrots,
it just discludes the Lorie or the lorikeets,
because they have a more fruit based to nectar diet.
One of the side effects you will notice
about making your own seed mix
is that now you suddenly have a treat to use
with small birds.
I hear all the time that people
can't come up with a valuable enough treat
for their small birds, and usually it's because
that treat is in the normal diet.
So using that seed mix, again,
not only as a diet conversion tool,
but also as a training tool, teaching recall
or teaching to play with toys or to self-entertain,
or what have you, whatever you wanna be working on.
But having a treat is really important
to be able to go further with training.
And as soon as I converted Blueberry to my own seed mix,
that's when the commercial seed mixes value
went crazy high up and I was able
to use spray millet as a treat.
So a lot of people wonder
how do you use spray millet as a treat
when it's in their normal diet?
Now I actually have millet in my recipe,
in case you missed that, it's a huge part
of this seed mix recipe, but spray millet
tends to be completely different in Blueberry's eyes.
And so I can do a lot of training
with the spray millet that I wouldn't use
with my just homemade seed mix.
So it works really great that way.
And once you're using those awesome ingredients,
you'll notice that the value goes up
of the stuff that you used to use,
and you can use it more strategically.
Now I do wanna point out and make it super clear
that when you first switch seed mixes,
I offered it all day.
So I had it readily available to Blueberry all the time
to make sure that weight was maintaining
and that it was actually being consumed,
'cause sometimes it can be kind of hard to tell,
especially when there's shells leftover
and the seed mixes can kinda look the same,
whether they've been eaten or not.
The cool thing with this seed mix is
I saw a little chew marks in the oats
(laughing) which made it a little bit more obvious.
But I just wanna make sure that
you have a successful transition
from your commercial seed mix to your homemade seed mix.
And then once that is completed,
you can then go on to use your homemade seed mix
in variations like this where I show you
with the seasonal feeding recipe and variations
to start incorporating new foods in the diet.
Little Blue, do they all look good?
Good quality?
- [Younger Girl] He's like which one should I eat?
This one?
No, this one?
Okay, I'm gonna go over...
- Thank you guys so much for watching
and wanting to do better by your small birds
and their seed mixes.
If you haven't already please go to my website
and check out my seasonal feeding system cookbooks
and my natural nutrition course.
And you will be on your way to the best nutrition
you can possibly offer pet birds.
- [Younger Girl] He loves green beans,
he's never gonna move (giggling).
- [Jamieleigh] I don't really need
the processor cleaned right now.
- [Younger Girl] Yeah, that's for the end Blue.
- [Jamieleigh] We need to keep using it.
- [Younger Girl] But you can clean the bowls after.
- [Jamieleigh] Excuse you (laughing).
- [Younger Girl] You go through moods too much I think.
(upbeat music)