Harrison's food

[Dee Dee Warren]

My grey eat Harrison's food and has done very well on it. No more feather picking.

[alie]

Hi, I'm new here and have my first bird, a female Timneh. She spent her first 8 years eating seed only. Now that I have her, I'm trying to improve her diet. She happily consumes the Zupreem Fruity sugary pellets, but she throws the Harrison's out of her cage! I'd feel better if she ate the Harrison's since it has no sugars. Any advice on how to convince her to eat it? I tried crumbling it over her brown rice since she loves that so much, but she tried picking through it.

Thanks

[Dee Dee Warren]

Hmm I dunno, my grey took to it right away. I would ask your vet or give a call over to Harrison's for suggestions. For a long while Dr. Harrison was our vet, but he is no longer in practice and concentrates on the bird food.

[CeasarsDad]

alie wrote:

I'd feel better if she ate the Harrison's since it has no sugars.

Just a follow up to your post from last year. I was wondering, how have you done with your Grey and the switch to Harrison's. I went through this and have some ideas for you if you're interested.

[Talon]

Yes, Could you refresh me with ideas. Talon still fights me on this issue.

[CeasarsDad]

Hi Talon. :P
Since I am not a Harrison foods expert I can only tell you and others what I did to get Ceasar to switch from the trail mix he was on to Harrisons' Adult Lifetime Fine High Potency..

Like others I had lots of trouble getting my Grey to switch. I was worried that he wasn't getting the necessary food amounts daily so the first thing I did was to buy a gram scale off Ebay. I think I paid $19 for mine.. Really cheap and I would consider it a necessity for any bird owner.

Now, the purpose of the scale is to watch your Greys weight of course but you want to monitor how much he might lose. If at any time he loses 10% of his weight you switch back to what he was eating. You are looking at a weight loss of about 40 grams for the average Grey. Not alot of weight at all.

Now, if you are gonna start change over you must stick with it for a couple of days. If you quit right away because you think your Grey isn't eating you will never convert.

There are a few kinds of Harrisons. You have course and you have fine.. You also have regular and high potency. Greys can eat either so you need to have a bag of course and a bag of fine in both regular and high potency. 4 bags.. Why? because you don't know which he will like.. To make matters worse there is still another type called peppered and that also comes in 2 types.. yep.. Course and fine..

The trick is to find out which kind they like. It's a good thing that this food comes in 2 pound bags. You can get all types and see what one they like.

I began with course. Ceasar ate some but had trouble. I switched to Peppered.. Ceasar didn't like em..

Then came the Fine mix. At last he would eat them. I started by feeding him some pellets out of my fingers. I kept doing this until he refused more. His bowls got filled with this..

Monitoring his weight showed no loss.. He also got his veggies and fruits. He wasn't eating veggies just yet but he loved the fruits.

You have to almost force the new foods on him. Imagine a child that was use to only eating ice cream and candy. Then that child was forced to only eat health foods.. You can see that the child would not be happy at first.. but after a short time he will readily eat the good stuff..

The scale is most important. Do not try this without it. You can't see 40 grams of weight loss.. You must weigh daily.

I thought Ceasar would never convert.. I was wrong. I think you can convert Talon.. If you REALLY want to that is..

Good luck<br><br>Post edited by: CeasarsDad, at: 2007/05/12 06:37

[Talon]

Thanks, I do add it to her daily pellets & seeds. She only will eat the fine as well. I would just like to see her eat MORE!!! I haven't given up, we've been working on this for a couple of months now. I do have a scale and she actually has gained weight. I weigh weekly.

[Caspersmum]

Hi Talon,

I think CD's advice is fantastic, and I'd add my experience of the big pellet change - finger feeding works really well - I think you can almost fool your birds into thinking they're getting a real treat! As soon as I tried that, Casper took to it like a treat, and it worked just as well on my previous 2 birds too.

Personally, I prefer the fine grind - I think they waste a lot of the coarse stuff, as it just falls out of their beaks, so you have to give them a lot more of it to give them the same amount of nutrition (if you know what I mean!). Maybe that's me just being Scottish, but I don't like wasting money unnecessarily!

Julia

[judygram]

If we could just teach the birds to not waste money we would have it made.

[Talon]

Here, Here!! :P