Green Cheek veggie and fruit question

[brittish]

I need suggestions on what kind of fruits and vegetables to give my green cheek conure. He is 3 months old and he didn't like the strawberries, peaches, peppers or broccoli I tried to give him. What other things could I try?

 

[cdog]

I give mine apples, oranges, grapes, pears, bannanas, carrots, bell pepper, and they cant resist warm sweet potatoes.

 

[Doris48]

Mine loves fruit, oranges, blackberries, grapes, blueberries, apple, banana and dried fruit especially freeze dried mango...She is more picky in the veggie dept. But will eat peas, carrot and will pick at greens and the occasional green bean.She hates corn.I put sweet potato in quite often but she only picks at that too.I wish she would eat more veggies.

 

[cdog]

I know me too, mine take one bite of carrot or broccoli and spit it out. They will only eat zuccini, bell pepper, and sweet potatoes. But at least sweet potatoes have a lot of nutrients in them.

 

[Pedro]

Hi my GCC'S get a huge variety of fresh fruits & veg & sprouts. I mix them all together to give a colorful, interresting bowl of food. They also get hot peppers, almond pieces, passionfruit, some will eat pawpaw. Everything is chopped up into small cubes so they can pick them up & hold them in their foot. They also have a small amount of small parrot seed with equal parts of pellets.

This site is a good place to start regarding diet.
Fresh Food List For Parrots

 

[Moonybird]

My green cheek doesn't seem to berries, but likes mostly crispy food, like apples, watermelon, and carrots.

 

[KatherineI]

My GCC is 1.5yo and while I've had him 6 months, the only fresh things I can get him to eat with any consistency, are sweet potatoes (cut rather small, he hates anything large) and green grapes (cut in half) but NEVER red/purple grapes! Sometimes he'll take oranges (he prefers the clementines or mandarins). Thank goodness he loves to eat his pellets, is all I can say.

One of the things I find that helps to get him to eat, is to show him that it's yummy and eat it with him. Loki loves "table time", or following me in the kitchen, which is great because then I can get him to try anything I'm eating. It's how we discovered he likes yogurt (but so far only vanilla), warm oatmeal and tiny bits of scrambled egg. Yesterday we allowed him to try, and he fell in love with, Sun Chips. Not the best, but we hardly ever have junk food in the house anyway. He'll nibble on anything else I'm slicing, dicing or simply have. Tonight I'm making a veggie stirfry and I'll give him bits of each veggie.

The other trick is to keep trying. Be just as stubborn as they are! My mom's Senegal wouldn't eat anything fresh for the first 2 years she had her (a rescue bird), but by being stubborn and continually offering her fresh choices, eventually Chrissy started to eat fresh foods.

 

[Roxy_9_2011]

Hey, for my GCC I make smoothies with all kinds of fruits and veggies so I hide them in there and she LOVES eating/drinking it. Easy way to incorporate medicine if I ever need to Maybe try that? This way I also can eat it with her too and be healthy.

 

[Sulphiria]

Hey, for my GCC I make smoothies with all kinds of fruits and veggies so I hide them in there and she LOVES eating/drinking it. Easy way to incorporate medicine if I ever need to Maybe try that? This way I also can eat it with her too and be healthy.

That works wonders. I had read in another post about blending fruits and veggies with some apple juice and our birds go crazy for it, not knowing its loaded with everything they refuse to eat like spinich, broccoli, apples, etc.

 

[brittish]

Thanks for the advice! I tried the "monkey see monkey do" trick but I ended up with a belly full of fruit I'll just have to go out and buy a variety. The smoothie idea sounds great too.

 

[KatherineI]

You say a belly full of fruit like it's a bad thing!

I only take the teeniest of bites when trying to get Loki to eat something. Sometimes I even just pretend that I'm eating it and make the "mmm" and "yum" noises to get his curiosity going. I've never tried the smoothie thing because I don't have a juicer or blender (also, I currently don't have the counter space or storage to buy one anyway) but I'll definitely keep that in mind for the future!

Good luck!

 

[brittish]

You say a belly full of fruit like it's a bad thing!

I only take the teeniest of bites when trying to get Loki to eat something. Sometimes I even just pretend that I'm eating it and make the "mmm" and "yum" noises to get his curiosity going. I've never tried the smoothie thing because I don't have a juicer or blender (also, I currently don't have the counter space or storage to buy one anyway) but I'll definitely keep that in mind for the future!

Good luck!

Yea well he wasn't going to eat it. Not letting yummy fruit go to waste ;P

 

[Sylver]

The only way I can get Halo to eat any sort of fruit is if I break it in half and eat that half, even if it's something that he really enjoys. It's like he thinks I've poisoned it or something

He eats grapes, apples, chillis, carrots, broccoli, almonds (as a treat), nectarines, oranges, and watermelon.

 

[brittish]

He seems to really like peanuts, so maybe he prefers crunchy foods. I'll have to try carrots and almonds. Also going to try grapes and watermelon(if he doesn't eat it, I will. yummm) lol

 

[KatherineI]

It took about 3 months, but now I can get Loki to eat grapes and sweet potatoes without seeing me eat them first. He recognizes grapes now, even before they're cut in half for him and he goes absolutely gaga over them! And the happy noises? Off the charts! We're still working with other fruits and veggies though. I agree on only getting stuff I'll eat so that it doesn't go to waste. I also buy things in small quantities so I don't risk it.

Loki also likes crunchy foods, probably because his pellets are crunchy and he absolutely loves those. Does your GGC eat a seed diet or a pellet one? If it's seeds, maybe you could try coating the fruit in seeds first. Or if he likes seeds as a treat, you could try that as well. Loki was on a seed diet before we brought him home and now he won't touch seeds, so that trick doesn't work with him. But it is something that has worked with our rescue birds in the past.

 

[Sulphiria]

We found our birds like the dry fruits too. The conure we had went nuts for the dried bananas! They also enjoy the "foraging" veggies like sweet peas and green beans. We had to initially cut them open to show the birds what were inside, now they take them and eat the pods out of them, lol. Bit of a waste, but they enjoy it.

 

[brittish]

The breeder I bought him from gave me a weeks worth supply of his food. I believe the brand is Harrisons but it is a Cockatiel mix I believe? It is seeds, sunflower seeds, and a bunch of other little this and thats lol some nuts, dried up fruits of some sort. I'm thinking about switching him to something more nutritious. I hear a half pelleted half seed diet is better?

 

[KatherineI]

Straight pellets. I've never heard of a half and half. Pellets contain everything they need, whereas seeds do not. Harrisons makes a pellet, I've never seen what you've described though (I've also been out of the bird scene for the last 5 years, I still had birds when California Cages were all the rage!). I have Loki on Zupreem Natural, the small (they come in XS, S, M, L & XL) ones. He absolutely loves them and while I was doing the switch from seed to pellet (you're supposed to do it slowly, ha!) he started shunning is seeds within a day or two, so after a moments hesitation, I just started giving him straight pellet without finishing the transition and he never had an issue. Absolutely loves them!

Seeds can be a great treat (like what I described for the fruit), but I personally wouldn't use seed as a diet staple. The difference between a bird that is 100% pellet fed with fresh options given, compared to a bird on seed is amazing.

 

[brittish]

When I get paid Friday, I am going to buy him a proper diet. Do you recommend a certain brand? He mainly only eats the sunflower seeds and the other random things in there, not so much the seeds. There are a couple nuts in there he digs for, likes the green and red pieces(sorry parrot newbie). Here is the bag of food he came with.

 

[KatherineI]

I'm no expert either (it's been half a decade since I owned one!), but my Mother (who has a whole Aviary and has mostly rescue birds and works with a rescue) and my Avian Vet both recommend as natural as possible. No colors. Colors can lead to them picking out specific colors. A good friend of mine has 2 Too's and one won't eat anything orange but will eat anything red, while the other won't eat anything green but devours any other color.

I feed Zupreem Natural, which comes in a natural, lightish brown color (if I had an actual working computer, I'd add a pic to show you what I mean). Harrisons is what I used to feed my birds, at the time they were the same natural brown color and came in square pellets. The Zupreem has either a round (xs) or oval (S & above) shape. Sunflower seeds are a fantastic treat for them, so if you like, you could probably mix some of those in with his pellets a few times a week. I also don't know what is offered where you are (I don't assume everyone is in the US or that everything is available all over the country). Zupreem can be found even at a Petco or PetSmart. Harrisons needs to be purchased either at an avian specialty store, through an avian vet or online.