Our Gouldian Finch Diet

I’m just going to share how we feed our birds. This is not intended to be the be-all, end-all ‘law’ of how to feed Gouldians. There is a lot of discussion about the “best” way to feed. There might even be the occasional heated disagreement. But we consistently raise good size, healthy finches that parent their own babies, and this is how we do it.

Note that this is what we do now. We have evolved over the years, and probably will continue to do so in the future. We like to learn, and as manufacturers improve on what they’re doing we will embrace it. If you read a post last year, it might have a slightly different list.

Basic Diet in Order

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Fresh Veggies

Pellet Food

Egg Food or other protein

Seed Mix

Birdie Bread

Tiny bit of Fruit

Supplements

The Why and How of the Diet

So. The main food for our finches is fresh food. Vegetables mostly with a small bit of fruit. Mine don’t really like fruit that much, and I don’t like to waste food. So after teaching them how to eat fresh foods, they were still rejecting most fruit and I cut it out instead of continuing to waste it. I usually serve vegetables in the form of chop, which you can read about here.

VEGETABLES

Here are just a few of the veggies we serve. The first 5 are their favorites.

Kale

Spinach

Collard greens

Broccoli

Corn (cut off the cob, although they ‘re happy to eat it on the cob)

Carrots, steamed

Peas

Sugar Snap peas

Cooked Sweet potato

Frozen veggies from Walmart: carrots, green beans, corn, peas mix, thawed/warmed –> this is the I’m-too-tired backup plan. I keep these on hand.

The Parrot University aims their diet plan, the Circus Diet, toward bigger birds but it could totally be for finches. Just chop it smaller.

PELLETS

UPDATE: I will leave the following information here, but we now have reduced our pellet use and increased the protein foods. Pellets were sometimes being changed by the manufacturer, we couldn’t get some birds to eat some brands so we were buying 3, they’re reportedly hard on the kidneys so we were grinding them into the chop anyway— etc etc. I’ll write a post and link it.

[The second food we serve is pellets. We have had a little bit of trouble recently with the pellet food because Roudybush changed their formula and the birds decided to reject it. I then switched to Harrison’s which they ate for a couple weeks (long enough for me to order a bunch) then they turned their beakies up at that.

Darn it.

So now I bought another bag of Roudybush and about half of them are eating it. I’m not really sure what to do. I did find they’ll eat the Harrison’s and the old bag of Roudybush if I wet and warm it. Little prince and princesses!

You’ll have to try to find the best pellets for yours, and it can be really frustrating if they have not eaten pellets in the past. More on that in a future post!]

Please don’t go crazy on the pellets. They are an extruded processed food.

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