Lovie afraid of spray millet

[gracebowen]

Ok so until recently I never gave my new fids millet still on the twig. I figured they got enough millet in their seed mix

Then 2 days ago I bought some on a bit of a whim. I aslo thought it might help Cora get a little better about trusting my hands. She is afraid of it and ran from it. I got her to bite it hoping she would see it at food. No luck.

 

[MonicaMc]

Try breaking off little pieces of it and putting it in her food dish. It may be less scary that way.

 

[EllenD]

I agree, when it's seed on a big, long spray like that, and if the bird has never seen that before, she probably doesn't realize what it is, or that it's even food. Try breaking off very small pieces of it, even just pulling off some of the seeds and placing them beside the spray, so that she'll see that they are seeds. Once she eats a few of the loose seeds, which they usually absolutely love (I don't know why spray millet is better than the millet that is in most seed mixes, but it is), then she'll most likely walk over to the small pieces of spray and start eating the seeds off of them. Once she gets used to eating the loose seeds, then eating the seeds off of small pieces of spray, eventually she'll be okay eating the seeds from a whole spray. It's just a slow process that will take some time, you can't rush it.

I'd suggest that you get her feeling secure and used to eating the seeds from the spray this way first, by just laying them down somewhere near her, like in her cage or on a plate, etc., before you offer her the millet from your hand. She first needs to just simply realize that it's food/seed and that it's good and she likes it before she feels okay with eating it out of your hand. I wouldn't try to feed her from a spray in your hand before she is well-acquainted with and will regularly eat from just the spray and/or the smaller pieces of spray just laying in her cage, on a plate, etc. Once she's perfectly fine with eating the millet from the spray and actually enjoying it and looking at it as a treat that she looks forward to, that's when you start using it as a hand-training/taming tool...