Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Your opinions on the above two products please.At present i'm using kaytee exact for parakeets, my birds enjoy it.

Recently a distributor , has been marketing the nutribird pellets approxmitely 40% cheaper then Kaytee. 40% is 40% , Can nutribird compare to Kaytee ???

Thanks

I can't say I've ever even heard of Nutribird, much less used it. Pick up a bag and compare the ingredients, see how it differs from the Exact. Most are based on corn, wheat or soy, with wheat being the preferred but none being perfect.

Personally, I don't think pellets are a great diet for parakeets, anyway. The high level of artificial ingredients in pellets has been implicated in causing gout and liver & kidney problems in, well, all birds, but most frequently parakeets and cockatiels. Pellets are cooked at such high temperatures that most NATURAL nutrients are cooked away, and the artificial replacements are not as easily absorbed by the body. Additionally, pellets usually have too high a percentage of protein for parakeets which would naturally eat grass seeds, which are quite low in protein. In my experience parakeets do much better on a seed-based diet, including sprouted seed, with additional fresh foods (esp. dark leafy greens).

Here's a good food pyramid for grass seed-eating birds, for rough percentages:
http://www.holisticbirds.com/Hbn02/autumn02/images/fptiels.gif

BTW I'm not just spouting information I heard from someone else; I fed pellets for many years, but over the past 1-2 yrs have been gradually increasing the amounts of other foods, especially sprouts and vegetables, and my birds look & act MUCH healthier. I may stop using pellets altogether, they don't seem to add anything worthwhile to my birds' diet.

Price-wise I think I spend less now than I did feeding pellets. Some of the foods cost more, such as the fresh produce, but others cost less -- such as the seed. I use a very plain seed, non-vitamin-fortified, for both sprouting and feeding dry. They get their vitamins from the sprouts (which are much more nutritional than dry seed), leafy greens, and other fresh foods.

I started lowering the amount of pellets because I lost one of my favorite 'tiels to visceral gout, which I discovered is frequently caused by a pellet-based diet.

- Lara

Seeds are very high in fats, though, so make sure your birds are also getting lots and lots of veggies (like Lara`s birds are). Otherwise you may find yourself having problems with liver disease, fatty growths or general obeisity.

I also find the quality of the product and the company I buy from is very important. I don`t know about nutribird... and I avoid Kaytee because I disagree with some of their business practices. I personally use Hagens, Roudybush, Harrisons and Zupreem Natural. My cockatiels get all four brands of pellets mixed together. All four of these brands are free of the many dangerous chemicals sometimes used as a preservative in pellets, and they`re also free of artificial coloring.

Also, avoid feeding large percentages of the fatty oil seeds like sunflower and safflower... grass seeds like millet, canary, flax, niger, etc. are lower in fat. This goes double for birds in cages rather than large aviaries since they don't get so much exercise.

Sprouted seed is lower in fat than regular seed, too. In sprouts, the fat is depleted as it's converted into other nutrients such as amino acids. That's WHY seeds have so much fat -- not to make birds fat LOL -- but to be converted into sprouts.

- Lara