Firstly, apologies to everyone for the lack of new posts in the last month. It’s been the combination of a temporary move to a different project at work (where I normally write my posts), a complete lack of imagination on my part, and a weeks holiday. However, we’re back on track now with a new foraging toy now, and another idea or two bubbling away at the back of my mind, and since we’ve practically run out of birdie mash, I’ll be making up a new recipe for that at the weekend.

If you missed the last post, Feathers and Forage is now a year old! Last month was a record breaking month for us with the most traffic to the site so far. We had a total of 633 unique visitors with 150 of you returning at least once, and 2,143 pageloads altogether. As I’ve seen a few of you coming here from Facebook, I’ve set up a Feathers and Forage FB group. Please feel free to join, discuss foraging, toys and recipes, make suggestions to me, and post photos and videos of your own birds foraging.

And now for the main feature – Foraging Toy No. 49. I used a skewer as the basis for this toy, mainly for convenience, since they’re so easy to use, but you can also use leather or wire. I cut up one of our dried corn cobs into about inch thick chunks. Our two absolutely love pulling the corn from the cobs, so I thought they’d love them as part of a toy. They are pretty tough to cut through, but I managed ok with my little hacksaw, or you could try using a breadknife. It’s very easy to make holes through the soft core once you’ve got it chopped. To add a little more challenge, I wrapped the corn cob in newspaper, then threaded it onto the skewer.

Next is a cat ball, with the bottom removed, as described in previous posts. This I threaded on with the large hole at the bottom, and makes filling the ball much easier. Above this, I finished it off with another corn cob wrapped in newspaper, a block with three muffin cups upside down over it, and four long pieces of shredders. The last step was to fill the cat ball. The little cage is great for holding all sorts of things, like pieces of millet, pumpkin seeds and dried fruit. In this case, I used small peices of nutriberries.

Here’s another origami foraging toy for you. This one is made of three “dishes” stacked on top of each other. The dishes themselves are easy to make, and are made up of three identical units. I found that the best size to make these units from is a square from an A6 piece of paper (quarter of A4). The easiest way to do it is make a square from an A4 piece of paper and divide it by four. You’ll need nine of these squares to make three dishes, but you could make even more and have a taller tower if your birds really enjoy this toy.

I’ve made my own pdf instructions for the Triangular Dish and tested it on Tom, who managed to make it with no help from me, so they should be understandable! If you have any questions about the instructions, please post a comment on this post and I’ll do my best to answer them. Normal printer paper should be stiff enough to hold its shape easily, and I haven’t had any problems getting the dish to stay together, but if you are worried about it, use water and flour to form a glue to secure the paper together.

Next I cut some triangles out of a cardboard plate. Three of these triangles should fit nicely into the bottom of the dish, and the fourth should be a bit bigger so it can cover the top dish nicely. Now it’s best if there’s already a small hole at the bottom of your dish. If there’s not, you can either resize your folds a bit to form a hole, or you can just make a hole with a pen. Make another hole in the cardboard triangle too. This triangle will give the dish some stability. I chose to use leather to hang the dishes on. Knot the bottom and thread on the first dish. Put whatever you want inside, then thread on the next one and repeat with as many dishes as you want. Finish off with the triangle lid you cut out, and tie a loop at the top. If your bird doesn’t get the hang of this toy, make holes around the side of the dish to give them somewhere to start ripping into the paper.

I’ve been wanting to buy this toy for a while, but as it’s quite expensive (£22) I kept putting it off to buy other things. However, I have it at last and the birds love it. The cage itself is quite large – 4″ tall by 4″ wide, and hexagon in shape. The bar spacing is larger than I expected, but (under supervision) even Misfit, our smallest budgie, could play with it, without being able to fit her head between the bars at all.

The whole of the top comes off, which makes it really easy to fill. Just drop in whatever you want – arrange it so it doesn’t fall straight through, and put the lid back on.  To get the birds used to it, I hung it on their playgym, just with a piece of millet inside. It was immediately a huge hit, and I could easily watch and make sure none of the birds were in danger of fitting their head through the bars and getting stuck. I wouldn’t recommend this toy for any birds smaller than a cockatiel. Although I was happy for the budgies to play with it under supervision, I wouldn’t be confident to leave it in their cage with them, just in case the bar spacing was wider at one point and they did get their head caught.

I filled ours the first time with a variety of things, edible and not. The photos show the front and back of the toy, and you can see there’s a piece of dried corn on the cob, a bundle of seagrass,  a couple of pieces of balsa wood, a knotted piece of shredders, a mini munch ball, green vine ring, a natural chew, pine cone, the remains of a vine star and vine ball from old toys, a twist ball, and a paper toy. As well as this, there was a piece of millet (which Lofty quickly pulled out and ran away with) and a couple of nutriberries that are better hidden. Here’s a few photos of them, when it was first put into their cage.

They really seem to be enjoying this toy. Every day more things are chewed or pulled out, although they don’t yet seem to have found the two hidden nutriberries.

Now it’s getting towards winter, loads of shops are selling extra food and feeders for wild birds. This toy uses a feeder that is designed to hold suet blocks. There are a couple of different designs for this. The one I have the front and top open away from the back and sides, while other versions just the top opens. It’s really simple just to fill it with paper and treats, and let them find things on their own. I made up some paper “sweets” some of which are just filled with newspaper, others have newspaper and sunflower seeds inside. The cast majority of these are only plastic coated, not powder coated, so if yours is plastic coated, only let your birds play with it under supervision. Wild birds tend not to chew on things, so plastic is fine for them. Parrots though could decide to chew the plastic off. Ours is hung on the playgym, where I can keep an eye on them playing with it.

This is a variation on the Treat Cup I posted a couple of weeks ago. The craft shop was selling 4cm terracotta flower pots for 39p. If you go with terracotta, only use ones that aren’t glazed, as the glazes contain lead. Terracotta is porous, so don’t use it for any wet or moist foods, as they can be absorbed into it and grow mould. Always dry them thoroughly after washing. They’re pretty much the perfect size to hang and hold a nutriberry, and the plastic disks I have perfectly fit on the top of pots. These are really simple, just a piece of leather with a knot in one end, a mini flower pot, plastic disk and a loop at the top of the leather. Here’s a video of Lofty when I gave it to her. At around 0.14, she flips the “lid” up to hold the flower pot open, so she can pull out the millet, then holds it in her foot to eat it.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of research into diets for our birds. As we know, all seed diets are very bad for your birds as they can cause fatty liver disease, as our pet birds don’t get enough exercise to burn off the high energy seeds provide. All pellet diets are also bad as they can cause kidney failure due to too much protein. And most people will tell you that fresh foods are a necessary part of your parrot’s diet, but how can you get them to eat their veg? All in all, the best diet seems to be one with as much variety as possible.

Our birds have had their diet altered last week. They now get a layered salad in the morning and homemade beak appetite in the evening. During the day they also have pellets in their foraging trays and nutriberries and millet in their foraging toys.

I make up the layered salad on Sunday evenings. For our six it takes about an hour to wash, chop and arrange all the vegetables. I fill up three boxes about a litre or so in volume for the week for them, and it keeps from Sunday to Sunday in perfect condition. The layered salad has five layers that are assembled then kept refrigerated, along with a few more ingredients that are added before feeding.

The bottom layer is chopped leafy greens. For this layer, I’m using a bag of seasonal mixed salad from Morrisons. As far as I can remember, it contains greens like baby spinach leaves, rocket, watercress, rosette bok choy and lamb’s lettuce. Don’t use watery lettuces like iceberg lettuce as the water in them far outweighs the nutritional value. This week, I also added chopped parsley into the mix. The whole bag was just enough to give me a good layer of greens on the bottom of all three boxes.

The next layer is the chopped vegetable layer. You can use any vegetables you like. I used baby corn, mange tout peas, sugar snap peas, chilli peppers – frenso and bird’s eye chillies. I use the whole pack that each of these come in at the supermarket, and mix them all up together before adding this layer to each tub.

Above this comes a layer of broccoli and carrots. I chop the tops off the broccoli and chop them into smallish pieces, then slice up the stems to go in. The carrots are left with the skin on, and are grated. We leave a couple of inches at the top of the carrots, and grow them as mentioned in a previous post. I use two carrots and a good sized head of broccoli for this layer.

Next is the first of the layers that will help keep the salad fresh. This is the citrus layer. The recipe I got this from suggests using apple, oranges and grapes, but as our birds aren’t big fruit eaters – either in the wild or in our home – we’ve just used two oranges for this layer. Slice up the oranges, then chop each slice into four or six, and create a solid layer on top of the box. This layer has resulted in a lot of yellow faced birds in our house!

The last layer is the layer of frozen veg. These super cool the salad, making it last longer. I’ve been using mixed veg with peas, sweetcorn, green beans and carrots. This last layer completely fills the tubs – and sometimes makes it hard to get the lids on! Reducing the air like this also helps it stay fresher. Now it can go in the fridge.

Before feeding, put the days layered salad in a bowl and mix in some cooked beans, sprouted seed (this is covered in one of my previous posts), cooked grains and uncooked pasta. The uncooked pasta will absorb moisture from the mix and soften. We also add pellets into the mix. And we cooked a large amount of pasta and beans for this, then frozen them in small bags for daily servings. This way they just need to be defrosted in the morning and mixed in. The recipe also suggests adding in soft fruits, like berries, peaches, melons and plums, but again since ours aren’t naturally fruit eaters, we’ve skipped the fruit.

You don’t need to use any of the leafy greens, vegetables or citrus fruits I have. All you need to have is a layer of leafy greens, followed by a layer of vegetables, then a layer of broccoli and carrots, a citrus layer and finish with a layer of frozen vegetables.

There are a lot of benefits to the layered salad. In the fridge, layered salads generally stay fresher than mixed salads. Juice from the citrus layer filters down through the salad and raises the acidity levels. The frozen layer super cools salad. Using a safe anti-bacterial for washing the veg will also help to keep things fresh. I use diluted apple cider vinegar to wash all my vegetables, and the oranges, since I leave the skin on them. Only the frozen veg doesn’t need to be washed.

The salad can safely stay in the cage during the day without spoiling. The pellets and pasta absorb most of the moisture from the mix, and over time it will dehydrate, rather than spoiling.

There are a lot of benefits to your parrots too – you no longer have to introduce individual vegetables anytime you offer a new one. Once your birds are comfortable with the mix, you can change any of the fruits and vegetables in it, without changing the appearance of the salad. They’ll generally accept and eat whatever is in it.

Adding different things into the mix also makes it a great foraging experience for them. They dig through it looking for rice, sprouts, pellets or particular vegetables, and you can occasionally add special treats to it, like sunflower or pumpkin seeds, pop corn, etc, to hold your birds interest.

As I mention in my introduction to Captive Foraging, it’s natural for birds to forage in the morning, and again in the afternoon/evening, with socialising, preening and napping coming in between the two. Feeding twice a day is much more natural for your birds and gets them a lot more excited about eating. And a bowl full of green, orange, red and yellow vegetables, with purple, white and brown beans, rice, sprouted seed, pasta and pellets is much more interesting than just a boring bowl of pellets or seed all the same colour the morning.

Before we started feeding this salad, Misfit would eat all vegetables we gave her, like a good girl. Gizmo would eat broccoli, baby corn and carrot tops. The two male budgies we didn’t really see eat any vegetables except their carrot tops and occasional nibbles at broccoli. The cockatiels were even worse, and wouldn’t touch any vegetable if they could help it, other than dried corn, and Kami even runs away from the carrot tops when we put them in the cage. We started feeding the layered salad on the 2^nd of November. Kami is now eating sweetcorn and peas – pulling all the mushy bits out of the skin, then throwing the skin away – broccoli and carrots, and we’ve seen both her and Lofty throwing everything around the bowl – and out of it – it’s not a tidy meal. Lofty will also eat sweetcorn now, and may eat other things, though we haven’t seen her or the budgies eating anything specific yet.

The original recipe came from Pamela Clark at the Parrot House: http://www.parrothouse.com/pamelaclark/feeding.html

Carrots are great for your birds, but so are the leafy green carrot tops. Usually in the supermarket, it’s hard to find carrots that still have the leafy greens attached, since most are cut off before packaging, so we grow our own. Leafy greens, like carrot tops, are a good source of vitamin A.

Growing carrot tops is very easy – even for those of us with no gardening skills at all. All you need is a container (I’ve used a food container, with a nice wide base), water and some carrots. Simply cut a couple of inches off the top of the carrot, and sit them in the water, in the container. I usually make sure the carrot tops are semi-submerged, like little orange islands. Change the water every day. After a few days, you should start to see green shoots coming out of the top. After a week or two, you should have islands with little green forests on top. Your carrots will grow roots too, so don’t worry if you see little white “strings” growing off it. If the carrot turns black, then throw it out.

Once you’ve got a few stalks a couple of inches long, you can give it to your birds. I push mine through the top of the cage bars, so the leaves hang down over one of the perches. The budgies love their carrot tops, and have it nibbled bare within about half an hour. The cockatiels are less keen – Kami generally runs away from it, while Lofty will occasionally lick it, but hasn’t gone as far as nibbling on it yet. Once the birds have done all they want to it, Put the carrot back in the dish, and the tops will regrow. I put a couple of new carrot tops in water every couple of days at the moment, as I’m trying to get to a point where I always have carrot tops ready for the birds, and they can have one a night, rather than once or twice a week. Hanging food from the top of the cage, is also a great foraging oppertunity for your birds.

This is a pretty easy toy, and should go down well with any birds that love shredding. I opened a hole in the top of five cat balls, and used a nail file to make sure all the edges were smooth. Next I cut five lengths of seagrass, one per cat ball. I knotted the sea grass then threaded on the cat ball, and a bead that was big enough to close the opening in the top, then tied it onto a plastic disk – four around the edge, and one through the centre. I also made a loop that I pushed through the centre hole of the disk, to hang the toy by. Next I filled the cat balls. Two I filled with scraps of newspaper, two with bits of palm leaves (from shredders that I un-wove), and the last with bits of sea grass. Into the very centre of all this, I pushed some small bits of millet. So far, the newspaper filled balls appear to be the favourites but the ‘tiels haven’t yet found the millet in the centre. I’m sure once they do, the rest won’t last long. At the moment all five cat balls have millet in, but once they’ve emptied the toy a couple of times, I’ll reduce it so only a couple have millet in to make it more challenging.

Photo coming soon!

This is a very simple toy. It’s essentially just a cup with a lid. The blue cup I’ve used came off one of their old toys. It has quite a big hole in the base. To close this hole, and so that the cup hangs straight, I used a plastic disk underneath the cup. I used another plastic disk on top to form the lid. To hold the lid more or less in place on top of the cup, I tied four pieces of leather through the holes in the plastic disk. The leather also gives the ‘tiels something to pull on to help them lift the lid up. Once she has lifted the lid and made  a gap, Kami wriggles her head back and forth through the gap, until she can get hold of the treat in the cup, and pull it out with her. When they get more adept at getting into the cup, I’m going to hide the treat under a selection of small wooden beads and paper, to increase the challenge for them.

Here’s another balsa wood toy, and very easy to make. It’s based on the “Snack Trays” by Super Bird Creations. The toy is quite expensive ($15 – $20 USD) but very cheap and easy to make. I used a kabob to hang mine, like the “Snack Trays” are hung on, but you could use anything to hang it. I cut six rectangles from a sheet of balsa wood, to hang them evenly, I stacked them together and drilled a hole through the center of all the blocks. Next, using a wider drill bit, I made four holes – one in each corner, halfway through the blocks. These little recesses will hold the treats. I stacked all six blocks simply one on top of the other, but you could separate them with beads or other blocks if you prefered. I filled each of the recesses with a small amount of seed. I gave them the toy at bedtime on Thursday – I generally put new foraging toys in at bed time as that way the toys are there, waiting for them when they wake up, and I don’t have to worry about either myself or Tom forgetting to put them in before leaving. By the time I got back from work on Friday, every single seed was gone, as were four of the blocks of balsa wood and half of each of the last two blocks were also gone, with just a pile of spliters on the bottom of the cage, so we can judge this toy was an outstanding success. For larger birds, or birds who enjoy chewing on wood, use pine instead of balsa wood.