Monday, September 14, 2009

Things I Always Wanted to Ask Big Bird???

Week of September 13th

Post this weeks unrelated bird questions to this blog posting!

Wednesday:

1. Do you feed your birds oats?

Tuesday:

1. Don't the vitamins on coated seed get thrown away when a bird hulls its seed?

Monday:

1. How often should we give vitamins?

7 comments:

Rich said...

Hi Linda. This is a question I should have asked when we were discussing vitamins. How often should we be offering them to our birds, should it be everyday or a couple times a week? It is amazing to see birds perk up after them being administered vitamins, more active and perky. Rich

Linda Hogan said...

Seed diets are notoriously deficient in vitamins. Deficiency that may develop are not usually of just one vitamin but rather many.

When you feed primarily a seed diet with bread and greens, the birds benefit greatly from daily vitamins. I think you could use them three times a week and probably not notice any loss in condition but then that is just one more thing to keep track of and the poultry ones are so inexpensive that it is easier for me to just use them daily.

Also I have noticed that some of the more inbred birds are so susceptible to eye infection that using daily vitamins seems to keep the incidence down.

Emily said...

Hi Linda,
I understood that vitamins should not be added to seeds as the birds do not actually eat any of the vitamins when the seeds are hulled. How are the vitamin coated seeds from Wall Seed treated? I'm intrigued and would like to use them at your recommendation.

Thanks,
Emily

Linda Hogan said...

Emily

The Bird of Paradise from Wall Seed coat the regular seed first with just the right amount of wheat germ oil and then dust again with just the right amount of premium vitamins. When the bird takes the coated seed in its mouth, the right dose is left in its mouth!

This works better than fortified seed where the vitamins are cooked into the hull..although these too are better than plain seed. Birds will even show some improvement on fortified seeds over regular seeds.

Even if you do not want to feed this to all of your birds, do a test group and include some that are out of sorts. I always test on both the best and the worst looking birds in the aviary...

Emily and all of you reading this, why not try the Bird of Paradise coated seed and report back what you observed when you feed it to your birds?? Simply call Nancy, (she is off on Tues and Thursday) at 316 263-0850 and either order the mix or for you Border breeders order just straight coated canary!!

Janet said...

Hi Linda,

Do you feed your birds oats? Janet Hemesath

Linda Hogan said...

Janet

My birds love oats! At this time of the year when I want them to finish the molt and discourage hens from nesting at the wrong time of year, I increase the carb's and oats is a good way to do that!!

They will eat steel cut oats, which are just oats that are cut in small pieces. Steel cut oats are readily available at health food stores.

My birds actually really prefer regular (rolled) oatmeal over steel cut oats probably because of the more obvious white color and larger flakes. I buy the inexpensive off brand regular cooking oatmeal, not minute or instant style because they like to nibble the flakes.

Anonymous said...

Do you feed the Bird of Paradise seed all year long, if not, when?