How Do You Put the “Social” in Bird Food?

Last Updated on February 16, 2023 by Mitch Rezman

We talked about birds being the godfeathers of social media.

Birds are flock animals.

Your bird was born expecting to be in a flock. When the bird comes into your home you become its flock.

We have interactions with caged bird keepers from around the planet every day. “He won’t eat that” “I’ve tried that” “I just can’t get him off of his sunflower seed diet” (yes we actually hear that a lot – sigh).

We talk about food in a minute because you can’t talk about feeding your bird without talking about the social interactions your bird is seeking at feeding time.

We are not referring to finches or budgies in this discussion.

Popcorn always got her own dish served on the landing door of her cage.

It came with the plates we humans were going to eat from.

Inevitably she would fly over and start nibbling on the food at the edges of our plates even though her dish was filled with identical food.

We would mindlessly shoo her off our dining room table and she would fly back.

This defines life with a bird.

Popcorn was also a foodie. She would eat anything. Just about every bird food we offered her, although she got selective about some of the sizes of the seeds in a mix she was food agnostic for the most part.

Parrots in India

We had a ripped bag of Harrison’s lifetime fine granules – we put them in a little forging toy and she went right through them.

We’ve posted countless videos of her sharing my lunch.

The tail I’m trying to weave here for you is that for birds unless they get a little hungry in the middle of the night, food is a social event.

Social means flock activity, you are their flock thus buying the most expensive bird food available on the Internet then giddily filling up the feeding dish in the cage, you find yourself disappointed the next morning when the new bird food clearly had not been touched.

How many of you that have bigger birds that are struggling to get them to eat new and more healthful foods are not including them in your mealtimes?

HUGE SWARM of BUDGIES in Australia

You don’t have to have the bird jumping across your dinner table that is annoying. But keeping a small cage or stand in a dining area signals to the bird that we all eat together.

Your bird can be rewarded positively with millet and a few sunflower seeds for behaving itself – staying on its plate stand.

If you are letting your bird out of its cage when you get home from work, changing its food and water before birdie bedtime and when you get up in the morning repeating the process while the bird remains isolated from family activities may be the reason your bird is reluctant to try new food – human or commercially available bird food.

We also want to look at how are birds eat. Do we know how they eat? You watch this. Do you try to understand your bird’s behavior?

Do you offer larger pieces of bird food to larger birds like African grays and blue and gold macaws who like to eat with their feet?

Does your bird like to dunk its food but it drives you crazy because the water gets dirty so fast and you’re not there to change it.

You could add a Lixit water bottle but a hidden gem of ours in the food category is a line of pellets for my brand named Scenic.

A flock of cockatoos in our yard

Here is some of the 411 on Scenic bird food pellets

Scenic™ Bird Food is a completely formulated diet for exotic hookbill and softbill birds such as macaws, cockatoos, parrots, lories, budgies, mynahs, toucans, and finches.

Scenic Bird Food has improved the feeding protocols, nutrition, health, and reproduction of rare and endangered birds maintained in captivity throughout the world, including the Black Palm Cockatoo (San Diego Zoo) and Buffon’s Macaw (Not to be confused with the military macaw).

Available in a variety of shapes, flavors, and sizes, Scenic Bird Food can be fed to a myriad of different bird species at all stages of life.

What they don’t say on their site anywhere, although we talk about it on ours is that the pellets don’t break down when they get wet making them ideal for food dunkers.

A flock of Eclectus Parrots in Numfor

Are you making food fun? Are you hiding food in discoverable places?

Do you ever try to take food that your bird won’t eat and pretend that you eat it because birds always want would you want – right?

What about that human food thing?

I made it clear that chops can be fun but they are a lot of work, wasteful, and isn’t very nutritious.

We also need to keep things in perspective.

If your bird is on a nutritious commercial bird food diet – the amount of human food that he or she is actually going to ingest is minimal.

Thus Catherine and I eat fairly healthy, but on Sundays, a big serving of French fries or onion rings might show up for lunch.

Wild African grey parrot flock ~ Video

Popcorn always liked crispy things – she liked toast, she did not like bread.

We never felt a French fry with breading from an onion ring would really harm her well-being.

When we traveled her cage was right between and behind us.

We could be eating sh*t & Shinola on toast and she would not shut up until we figured out how to make whatever it was, stick between the bars of her travel cage – so we could enjoy some silence.