RIO Daily Food Seed Mix For Parrots - 1KG

RIO Daily Food Seed Mix For Parrots is an everyday seed mix from Rio for parrots, sold in two pack sizes.

Key Features

• Large seeds and nuts: A parrot mix, so the pieces are the size a parrot wants to hold in a foot.
• Two pack sizes on this listing: Choose above.
• Something to work at: Cracking a shell is work, and work is most of what keeps a caged parrot sane.
• A base rather than a whole diet: On a parrot this matters more than on any other bird here - see the section below.

What A Seed Mix Does And Does Not Do

• A seed mix is the base of a diet and not the whole of it. Birds kept on seed alone are the commonest nutritional problem a vet sees: seed is low in vitamin A and calcium and high in fat. Fresh vegetables, a calcium source and a vitamin supplement belong alongside it.
• Birds pick. A mix that is balanced in the bag is not balanced in the bird if yours eats the sunflower and leaves the rest, so look at what is left in the bowl rather than at how fast the bag empties.
• What goes alongside depends on the bird. Ask us and we will put a short list together for your species rather than leaving you to guess from a label.
• None of that makes this a bad food. It makes it the base of a good diet instead of the whole of one.

Feeding It Day To Day

• Blow the husks off the bowl every day. A seed bowl can look full and hold nothing but empty husks, and birds have gone hungry in front of a dish that looked untouched.
• Fresh water daily, changed rather than topped up, and twice a day in summer. Warm standing water grows bacteria faster than anyone expects.
• Give roughly what gets eaten in a day and tip the rest out. Seed left sitting in a warm room is seed going stale.
• Change over from another food across a week or so. Birds are conservative about food and a sudden swap can mean a bird that simply stops eating, which in a small bird is serious within a day.

Keeping Seed In This Climate

• Keep the bag sealed, dry and out of the sun. In this humidity seed goes stale quickly and attracts weevils and seed moth. Fine webbing in the bag, or small moths in the room, means throw it out rather than sieve it.
• A sealed tub in a cupboard beats the original bag clipped shut, and the freezer for a few days kills anything that came in with it.
• Buy what you will get through. Seed is cheap and a stale sack is a false economy.

Good To Know

• Parrots live for decades and diet is what decides how many of them. A seed-only parrot is the classic case of a bird that looks fine for years and then does not.
• Most parrot keepers end up feeding a mix of seed, pellets and fresh food rather than choosing one. Ask us and we will talk through the proportions for your species.
• Sunflower is the sweet shop of a parrot mix. A bird that eats only the sunflower is getting a high-fat diet whatever the bag says.
• Tell us the species and how many birds you keep and we will work out which pack size actually lasts you a month, rather than selling you the big bag by default.