Recommended Food


   Our babies and adults are fed Kaytee Exact® Pellets for Cockatiels. Sometimes we supplement with a little Zupreem Fruitblend, which is a colorful, sweet smelling pellet. We've recently started adding Entree, a bird food that contains 24 dehydrated fruits and veggies! Our birds love it! We also feed a variety of fruits, veggies, and "other" foods:
  • Broccoli
  • Carrots
  • Rice
  • Cheerios and other grain cereals, like Total
  • Apples
  • Grapes
  • Bananas
  • Cooked Pasta
  • Bread
  • Turnip Greens
  • Kale
  • Collard Greens


We also feed a food called "Beak Appetit." This is a cooked food, so you have ot make sure you remove it after about four hours so it doesn't spoil or collect bacteria. Our birds PREFER this food to any other! They receive it every other day, the cockatiels and quaker get about a tablespoon each, the bigger birds more, the smaller birds less.

About "sugary" pellets. I keep hearing from supposed bird "experts" that you should not feed your bird any of the fruit pellets that smell sweet. The reason? Birds will become accustomed to the sugar and eventually become very picky, refusing to eat vegetables, etc. This is a load of garbage. It has been shown the cockatiels are insensitive to the sugars fructose, sucrose, and glucose (Nutrition of birds in the order psittaciformes, 2001, Journal of Avian Medicine and Surgery). Why? Because they are not "ecologically relevant." Meaning: cockatiels are not nectivores, they are granivores, and are less likely to encounter these sugars regularly in the wild. I should also mention here that parrots have a very poor sense of taste because they have very few taste buds. So you don't need to worry about your bird rejecting fruits and veggies because it is on a perpetual sugar high. ;)