Think about what you are doing to your Budgerigars!
I have had a mountain of private messages asking for advice regarding the nutrition regime I have now adopted for my birds. There are way too many messages for me to reply to them individually. I will get around to documenting the many and varied steps I have taken and post them on this Web Site.
In the meantime first let me tell you a short personal story. I have a cousin David Weik, who is a local beekeeper, if he unknowingly has bees that are working a Canola crop the chances are that his bee hives in that area will die. You see most the Canola Crops these days is GM Canola, which is genetically modified to resist insect damage etc. It is this natural insecticide the plants produce that the bees take back to the hives in the nectar and poison the hive.
From the above story: do you know where your seed is coming from or how it has been grown or stored or has it been fumigated/contaminated???? I bet most don’t, most wouldn’t even know what country their seed is grown in. From the messages I have received, many give detailed outlines of what they are giving their birds, and I believe that the majority are well and truly overdoing it, killing their birds with kindness, if you like. I wonder from many of the messages if their birds ever get fresh water. Medication and supplements are good for the companies that are flogging the stuff, but do you know if there use is doing the birds any good, or in fact harming your birds.
There is a very big difference between: looking for birds, looking at birds and looking into birds. The later is the most important and probably the least practiced in this budgie caper, many breeders hear about something that someone else is doing, and just jump into the deep end without too much thought. Each aviary is an individual environment, so what works in one place may not work in another. Additionally, what appears to be working now may gradually be negatively impacting on your birds, it may take a few years for the problems you are causing to appear, you got away with it for a while, but now you are trying to climb an “oiled slippery dip”. Fertility falls off, hatchability decreases, addled eggs are the norm, smaller clutches of eggs, Hens dying in the nest box, chicks not getting fed, and the list goes on and on, I have experienced all of these problems, if you are real lucky the problems will be all happening at the same time, which is what happened in my aviary. If this happens to your aviary I guarantee you will be thinking of giving the game away. This is why I spent a lot of time and energy looking into the many and varied sources of these problems and the many and varied changes that needed to be made to help manage the problems. There is no magic panacea, there is no quick fix.
I think it is very important to note, that we need to give the Budgies a little more credit than we do, they have been around many more millions of years than we have, they are survivors. They are capable of knowing instinctively what they need in any given circumstance; our job is to ensure that we do not get in their way, with what we are doing.
I have helped many breeders regain the breeding ability of their Budgies, and the revigoration progame usually starts with putting most of the Medication and supplements in the Bin. Fresh water changed daily is another haBudgerigars are seed eaters, check the shape of their beaks that will confirm that. Yes we know that seed is not what it once was, with some of it being deficient in various minerals and vitamins etc. Therefore to counteract this problem you need to have a number of seed suppliers, don't rely on one supplier for your seed, get your seed from a number of different areas and mix it up a bit. I have one main supplier who is actually growing most of the seed they sell, additionally I have two other seed suppliers that I buy various seeds and blends from to give a chance of augmenting the vitamin, mineral content which is fed to my birds.
© Robert Manvell