BellaOnline Forums Home and Garden Birds Seed Junkie

I've just recently started feeding my tiels Zupreem Natural. I know it takes a while for cockatiels, especially older ones, to get used to eating pellets but it was the first thing my hen ate when I started adding it. I thought great, pretty soon the male will follow suit. No such luck. He has yet to touch the stuff while the female lavishes it lol. Right now I'm giving 1/8 cup of zupreem pellets and 1/8 cup of nutraphase fortified seed with 2 tsp. of Petamine. What should I do? He won't even try it and I'm certainly not going to starve him into it!

Some seed junkies never do attempt to try pellets, but since your female is eating them, he'll probably try it one time soon. You didn't say how long ago you introduced the pellets, so I'm not sure how long he has resisted them.

Do they eat fruits and veggies too? You can always press some of the pellets into an apple & if they don't already eat apple, you can press some of the seeds into the apple to get them started. A little bit of peanut butter on some toast with seeds and pellets could get him trying the pellets as well.

You are right in not removing the seeds. Birds really will starve themselves as they will not eat anything that they do not recognize as food.

I've tried feeding pellets for about 2 1/2 weeks now. I know sometimes it can take months or more! They don't like fruits (I've tried) but there is one vegetable mix that they love (don't know why, they hate everything else). It has sugar snap peas, carrots (yum), baby corn, red peppers and little stringey pasta. It also has mushrooms but I didn't know if they were okay to feed or not so I never did. Thanks for the tips though. I'll keep trying and see what works.