Bird Food

Bird Food: Seed Mixes and Pellet Diets

This bird food collection holds 43 diets for caged and aviary birds, split between species-matched seed mixes, pellets, nectar formulas and rearing mixes. Between them they cover budgies, canaries and finches, cockatiels, small and large parrots, lorikeets and honeyeaters, insectivores, breeding pairs and hand-reared chicks.

Seed or pellets?

Seed is what most birds recognise as food and cracking it keeps them busy, but birds pick out their favourite seeds and leave the rest, so the diet a bird actually eats can be much narrower than the one in the bag. Pellets answer that by putting the same nutrition in every piece: Vetafarm Nutriblend comes in Mini, Small, Large and Breeder, Trill Vitablend is made in small-bird and large-bird sizes, and Maintenance Diet Pellets, Paradise Pellets and Nutricore cover general feeding. Plenty of keepers run both — pellets as the base diet, seed and the Trill Mix-In Vegie Blend for variety. If you are changing a bird over, do it gradually and keep checking that it is still eating.

Match the mix to the species

The Forage Gourmet range is blended per species — Budgie, Cockatiel, Finch & Canary, Conure & Quaker, Alexandrine & Ringneck, Eclectus, Galah, Corella & Cockatoo, and Macaw, African Grey & Amazon — because seed size, shell hardness and oil content need to suit the beak. The Light versions cut the high-oil seed for birds that are gaining weight or living in a small cage. Lorikeets sit outside all of this: they are nectar feeders, so Forest Fusion, Golden Lori Rice Formula, Nectar Pellets, Blossom Nectar and the Wombaroo Lorikeet & Honeyeater foods apply instead of any seed mix. Insectivores have Insecta-Pro and the Wombaroo Insectivore Rearing Mix; breeding and hand-rearing are covered by Parrot Breeder Pellets, Nutriblend Breeder and the Wombaroo Granivore Rearing Mix.

Brands in this collection

Four brands make up the range. Vetafarm covers pellets, seed-based parrot mixes, lorikeet diets and rearing formulas. Forage is seed-mix led, in Gourmet and Everyday lines. Trill covers everyday seed mixes, Vitablend pellets, a vegie blend and an egg and biscuit mix. Wombaroo specialises in rearing mixes and lorikeet and honeyeater food.

• Vetafarm bird diets
• Forage seed mixes
• Trill bird food
• Wombaroo rearing mixes
• Bird treats
• All bird supplies