Cranky Senegal on a diet. Save me!

[BeatriceC]

So Leo is about 15 grams overweight and he has to go on a diet. He is a tad bit cranky about this, to say the least. Anybody have any tips for a cranky bird who thinks he's underfed? He's not, for the record, but he's not getting as much fruit as he wants, which is making him irritable.

 

[gracebowen]

Could you cut back any on some higher calorie food and use a lower calorie food. Carrots for example have 20 calories per human serving while corn is 80. Thats if I remember correctly. Green beans are also fairly low in calories.

Can you encourage more excersize so he could afford to eat more calories.

I have no experience with overweight fids. My suggestions are based purely from a hunan weight loss perspective.

 

[BeatriceC]

He already doesn't eat a lot of the higher calorie stuff. He doesn't like corn at all. It's one of the few foods he won't eat. He only gets nuts or seeds for training. I did try today to start making his training more active. He's now learned how to play "catch". I roll the ball on a table, he chases it, stops it, and uses his beak to send it back to me.

 

[gracebowen]

Grapefruits, Apricots, Oranges, Tangerines, Strawberries, Watermelon, and Apples cranberries peaches strawberries, cabbage, beets, asparagus, cucumber, lemon, cauliflower, tomatoes,, zucchini,Brussel sprouts, kale, broccoli,watercress, arugula, spinach, celery, bok choy, radish, plum, honeydew melon, black berry, jicima,

Snao pea, papaya, cantaloupe,

A quick google search showed all if theese to be low calorie. I dont know if all of them are bird safe or not.

 

[gracebowen]

We were typing at the same time. I guess we are thinking the same too since you started exercising him more already.

 

[gracebowen]

Do you think smaller meals more often would help?

 

[BeatriceC]

Smaller meals more often might work. He's just such a fruit pig. I give him the teeniest possible chunks of various fruits and he acts like I'm beating him for not giving him more. I honestly didn't realize with as little as I was giving him, that he was still getting too much. My perspective is skewed by the amazon, and now the macaw. The cockatiel free feeds pellets and doesn't overeat. I think I'm going to just add a few more training sessions for now to get him moving more, though he was already moving a lot, and see what that does.

In the interim, he's being a gigantic brat.

 

[JamesC]

In the interim, he's being a gigantic brat.

I thought that was the definition of a Senegal in general...

I suppose that I'm lucky with my sennie Sidney. He eats like a pig and stays pretty much dead on 150 grams. I'm amazed at the amount of food that little bird eats. Significantly more than my larger blue crowns. But he is also a very high energy bird. In the cage, he is climbing all around or hanging upside down rocking wildly. Out of the cage, he is all over the place trying to find trouble to get into. In retrospect, I think I should have named him "Taz" in honor of the Tasmanian Devil character.

I have experience with an overweight fid, though. My blue crown Tootsie was so overweight that she had fatty deposits all over her body when I adopted her. I thought she had some kind of cancer going on. Lived on a seed diet supplemented with fruit juices and all kinds of things that were not good for her. She was 248 grams the first time I weighed her. Which is about 60 or 70 grams overweight. Absolutely huge for a blue crown. It took years of changing her diet to get her down to a relatively acceptable 190ish grams. But we got there despite a hard fight and tremendous resistance from her. And I firmly believe added years to her life.

With endurance on your part, you can get your sennie down to a good weight. But from my experiences with Tootsie, it might take management from then on. I have to be careful about giving her treats. Too much of something she really likes and she almost immediately wants to fixate on that type of food and that is all she wants. It will result in a lot of screaming and fussing and throwing the good stuff out of her cups.

I made that mistake just recently. We moved 1000 miles over 2 days a little over a month ago. To help soothe her during the journey, I was generous with the amount of treats I gave her. Mostly nuts. The result was a setback and having to wean her back off of wanting so many of them. She got up to 207 grams. And I felt a lot of guilt for being careless. She is still loudly demanding her nuts. But that is gradually diminishing. She gets two nuts per day, one in the morning and one when I come home from work. Until she gets them, she will not stop squawking and getting worked up and fluttering her wings or flying to me in the kitchen.

The only thing I can think of to help you as you adjust your bird's diet is to slowly decrease the amount of fruit as you increase the veggies. Don't do it all at once. He may be less likely to notice that he isn't getting as much as he used to. Maybe dipping the veggies in a little bit of fruit juice to make them more attractive will help too.

Hope that it works out good for you both.

 

[MonicaMc]

Flight is the best exercise for parrots.

 

[BeatriceC]

He's not a great flyer. He came to me clipped and I've been trying to teach him how to fly, but the best he can managed is a controlled glide to the floor. Most of the time he just drops like rock.

I think part of the weight issue is that we play a lot and learn a lot of trick, and I really need to find some sort of non-food treat he likes. That's where most of his excess calories come from. He'll do just about anything for a bit of banana, and loves other fruits and, of course, nuts, but it would be nice to find a non-food motivator.