African grey parrot diet

When you’re considering making an African Grey parrot your pet you need to understand that you’ll be taking on a long-term responsibility of taking care of your pet, and by long-term when it comes to African Greys it means sometimes more than fifty years. It’s important to understand that these are rather complex creatures, much like humans, their well being is composed of a mixture of interaction with their owner, a large enough and clean cage and a healthy and balanced diet, and just like humans they are susceptible to stress. So knowing the correct diet for an African Grey parrot is crucial to your companion’s well being.

What one needs to understand from the get-go is that despite the fact that they are parrots, they cannot live on seeds and pellets alone. Of course they are necessary in their diet, but feeding them only that will lead to a seriously unbalanced diet and eventually an unhappy parrot.

When it comes to choosing which pellets to feed your African Grey it’s crucial to look for and purchase organic pellets because a lot of the pellets available on the market have unhealthy ingredients that will harm your pet in the long run. By looking for organic pellets you’ll also protect your parrot from the large quantities of sugar found in colored pellets. Besides their pellets an African Grey needs to eat what humans need to eat in order to have a healthy diet: fresh vegetables and fruit.

In the wild parrots eat fruit at their leisure, so make sure that you choose bright and colored fruit in order to offer your parrot the most nutrition possible and try to feed them organic fruit if possible.

You also need to offer them fresh vegetables and again focus on brightly colored ones to both attract them and to offer them the most nutrition. Pretty much anything that you would eat your parrot can eat it as well and you can also offer cooked vegetables like beans and lentils or sprouted seeds.

Interestingly enough African Greys will enjoy eating a hard-boiled egg once in a while and this is important because their species are more prone to calcium deficiency than other parrots you might want to leave the shell on the egg. You can look at it as supplying your parrot with both a calcium source as well as a source of fun.

What you should never give your parrot, even though you eat them without problems, is anything containing chocolate, rhubarb or avocado, and it should go without saying that they don’t eat meat nor should they ever be feed junk food or things that contain caffeine or alcohol.

As part of a healthy diet, just like in humans, you need to keep your parrot properly hydrated so make sure that there’s always fresh, clean water in its cage at all times. Also in order to promote the hygiene of your parrot make sure that you always clean its cage at least once a week, and the water and food dishes on a daily basis.