What fruits and vegetables are best for parrots?

Breeding

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Many breeders and pet owners feed their birds with pellets only. This trend is evident especially in USA. In Europe, pellets are not so popular and very often they have been fed only as supplement. The whole parrot order includes over 350 species, some of them feed primarily on seeds, others on fruits or nectar. I believe that there are still many things we don’t know about their natural nutrition and neither do producers of commercial diets.

Supporters of commercial diets always say that feeding with pellets is good because such nutrition is balanced and complex. I would oppose both arguments. Firstly, how can we set strict composition when we don’t know much about nutritional needs of many parrot species? Secondly, complex diet should contain large variery of vitamins and other supplements. But how can we be sure that they really work? Many scientific papers about doubtful efficiency of synthetic vitamins have been published in the past. Some commercial vitamin products are cheap, some are ten times expensive and for us breeders it might be difficult to assess their efficiency.

This short article should encourage breeders to feed their birds with natural food sources. Therefore we decided to create a few tables with vitamin and mineral composition of fruits and vegetables.

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FRUITS

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VEGETABLES

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Title photo: (c) Corey Leopold. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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