Experience is the Best Teacher:
SPOON FEEDING
By John LaTorre, Port Charlotte, FL, USA

    The time of the year has come when we are all getting ready to hand feed. It is also a time when we will read a good number of articles on hand feeding methods. Weil, I always chuckle when I talk to someone who makes the statement that spoon feeding is for beginners and not a good technique for hand feeding babies. This is so far from the truth: it shows how benighted some people are when it comes to hand feeding.                            

    The earliest birds my wife and I raised were fed from a spoon and, at that time, I did not realize the significance of this method. But also, at that time. this method was used exclusively, and now people have given it up for speed and ease.

   You see, it is much faster and nearer to feed with a pipette or a syringe; but why do we have to be so fast? To use a pipette and a syringe you have to feed a relatively thin formula, or it will bind the syringe. With a spoon, this is not a problem for a baby can pull the formula off the spoon. So, for this reason, you can make the formula as thick as you need to. 

    Now, you might say you cannot feed Day One babies with this method. Oh yes, I forgot the crop milk argument. If you watch the parent birds feed, you only need notice the thickness of what they are feeding their day-old chicks, and it is not thin.  [To those who have never seen this, just think of a pet bird who loves you so much he decides to feed you (regurgitate)]. That is what parent birds are feeding their babies.

    Now try to put a mixture of that thickness through a syringe. This is one major reason the babies are so big when left in the nest bow to be parent-raised. The parents do not feed their young a thin liquid diet!

      Last season, I spoon fed between fifty and seventy-eight "Day One" babies, and most were hatching at round the same time (including grey-cheeked parakeets0. When you feed a thick formula the food will not pass through the digestive tract as fast as the thin formula. This gives the digestive system time to absorb more nutrients from the food, and it can reduce the need for a larger quantity of food, as well.

    This also will give the baby the best possible start in life. One other point to make is homemade versus commercial formulas. As I said, we hand fed many years ago when you had to make your own formula. We can not possibly think that we have put the amount of time and research as these avian food companies have into their hand feeding formulas and extruded or pelleted diets. When used in the way these manufacturers suggest, they are far superior than anything we can make up at home. I think I have experimented for some ten years with commercial diets. The use of these diets, along with the spoon feeding method have given me an edge over most. because I have birds that mature quicker and breed earlier as a result.

    Never cut the hand feeding formula with pureed baby fruit, vegetables or cereals as this will interfere with the nutritional balance and will give you less favorable results. You may respond that this advice might be suitable for Psittacula, but could it be applied to other species? We have used the same method to hand rear African parrots, cockatoos, macaws, Amazons, and Grey-cheeks, with the same excellent results.

  HAPPY SPOON FEEDING! 

This article was originally printed in The Quarterly Psittaculids Review/ Spring 1998.  Rewritten with permission from author.