RIO Gourmet Food For Parakeets & Parrots - 250 g

RIO Gourmet Food For Parakeets & Parrots - 250 g is a 250 g complementary mix from Rio with fruit, berries and other extras, fed to parakeets and parrots alongside their everyday food.

Key Features

• A mixed extra rather than a staple: Fruit, berries and other pieces that a plain seed mix does not contain.
• Rio's stated additions: The brand names easily digestible protein, fats and essential fatty acids in the blend.
• Large crunchy morsels: Rio's own description, and the real difference from the small-bird version.
• Coloured with chili, spirulina and turmeric: Rio states the colours are natural and come from those three - worth knowing, because brightly coloured bird food usually is not.
• Two hundred and fifty grams: A single pack size on this listing.

Where This Sits In The Diet

• This is a complementary food. It goes alongside the daily diet rather than replacing it.
• Read it as the interesting part of the bowl rather than the bowl. Given as the whole diet it is too rich and too narrow.
• Treats and extras together stay under about a tenth of what a bird eats in a day, and a mix like this is easy to be generous with because it looks like food rather than like a sweet.
• Where it genuinely helps is a bird that has got bored of one mix and gone off its food. Variety is a real tool.

Serving It

• A separate dish works better than mixing it through the seed, because the bird will pick this out first and leave the staple either way - at least this way you can see how much went in.
• Take out anything soft that has not been eaten by the end of the day.
• Introduce it in small amounts. A sudden tubful of rich food upsets a small bird.

Good To Know

• Rio also names egg white in this one, which is where some of the protein comes from.
• If you are weighing this against the Rio eggfood, they do different jobs: this is a crunchy everyday extra, eggfood is a soft rearing food for breeding and moult.
• Keep the pack sealed, dry and out of the sun, and look at it before you use it. Anything musty, caked or webbed goes in the bin.
• If a bird is actually unwell - quiet, fluffed up, sitting on the cage floor or not eating - that is a vet the same day. Birds hide illness until they cannot, and by the time it shows there is not much time.