Harrison's Bird Diets - Evaluating a Handfeeding Formula

Excerpted from The Proceedings of the International Aviculturists Society Convention, January, 1997,

The only way to really evaluate a hand-feeding formula is to go back to the parents and investigate not only their own diet but the other circumstances of their life. A lot of problems and deaths in chicks are "blamed" on the hand-feeding formula but they really started way back when the egg was being developed.

Among the factors that affect the normal development of a hand-feeding chick are:

A veterinarian needs to be involved in the formula selection and monitoring process, because all those factors need to be evaluated. If you are just going to "dump" a good food on top of other problems, the food is going to become another part of the problem. In cases like this the breeders sometimes say, "Well, we tried that diet and that doesn't work."

When all of the factors are analyzed and it has been determined that there are no other contributing factors, eg, the parents are as normal as possible and on a high quality, nutritious diet, then you can evaluate the results of a hand-feeding formula.

We have taken a hand-feeding formula into a situation where the parents did not have the best husbandry and the breeders had to give some antibiotics, or yeast medication or do an occasional culture or treat a crop-emptying problem.

The homemade diets, such as the monkey biscuit-based diet we used to recommend, contribute to those kinds of problems consistently and people have just learned to accept them. Aviculturists are willing to accept 5% crop hernias and 10% crop-emptying problems and 15% gram-negative problems. They automatically put Myco 20 or antibiotics in the food and Nolvasan in the water and bring the parents out for a tetracycline treatment every six months. Those aviculturists already have a problem and they are just bandaging it.

Other aviculturists just throw infertile eggs and dead babies in the garbage can. Their production results then go down to a lower level where maybe only 40% of the eggs laid make it to the perch. If the aviculturist isn't using a veterinarian and isn't keeping records of baby bird problems, he is probably not even aware of his true results.

A recent client was discussing his breeding "success": 9 baby birds from 2 pair in 2 years. One pair raised 2 babies out of 10 eggs; the other pair has raised 7 babies out of 15 eggs. Now he has a dead male and is wondering what he did wrong. Well, he had symptoms for a long time: he had infertile eggs, poor hatchability, weak babies, and numerous baby problems. There has to be a cause for those because baby birds should not have those problems.

I understand one of the first things Grau and Roudybush at the University of California, Davis found when they were starting their research with cockatiels was that cockatiels had inconsistent crop sizes: one baby would take 2 cc of the hand-feeding formula, one would eat 5 cc, etc. (Cockatiels are known to have those kinds of genetic disorders relating to the high incidence of inbreeding.) The researchers had to go back and find a cockatiel model that could be the "laboratory rat." They had to standardize the physical characteristics in those birds before they could do the research on hand-feeding formulas.

Aviculturists are asking for scientific studies on what to feed birds that are no where near a standardized "laboratory" model. Information that may be obtained from Blue-fronted Amazons, for example, will not directly translate to Orange-wings or Yellow-napes -- each group is different. The kind of laboratory data the aviculture community is asking for demands a standardized Amazon. No one has those kinds of animals as pets. A researcher might use a lot of money and time resources to discover that Orange-winged Amazons require this much vitamin A under this specific genetic code and this particular set of aviculture housing arrangements. These results are limited to those circumstances.

There would be difficulties extrapolating this data to pet birds, especially if you consider all the possible scenarios that may affect a pet bird: flying, living out in the cold, living around a dog, chronic exposure to cigarette smoke, living under unusual lighting circumstances, etc. One bird may need ten times that requirement or 1/10 that requirement, or it may end up getting toxic from it. Who knows what will happen when research data from an aviculture situation is put into the pet situation?

So although the HBD results are empirical, the client base is fairly controlled because we are seeing birds from the same town, from the same environment and applying the same standards to these birds time after time. Then when we change the diet, these are the results we see:

That's why we say the hand-feeding diet must be formulated. Even though we have seen formulated diets that don't meet these standards, had there been a veterinarian involved that knew a little bit more about formulated diets and how to modify them and the company was working with them (feathers were not right, feet were dull) then they could have made the correct modifications to the formula.

We are available to say, "Well, if birds show up with ....., here's what we do to make the changes." We have seen positive results by just changing to HBD.

That's why veterinarians need to be involved and need to be educated to make those distinctions. The other answer is the bird is never going to be the standard lab animal; therefore, there is never going to be the standard diet to apply in all situations. Across the line hand-feeding formulas vary and the results in birds that are highly inbred and highly immuno-suppressed because of the way they are raised are equally variable.

The daily challenge of the veterinarian is how to apply a sliding set of circumstances to a sliding set of clients. They are not always going to be the same. One day you will be working with a Rose-breasted Cockatoo, which you may have no information on, and the next day you will be working with a cockatiel. If the cockatiel happens to be a white-faced, it is a totally different creature than a grey bird.

By just changing the hand-feeding program, you don't always get rid of all the problems. But you can eliminate most of the problems that many breeders are spending a lot of time and money trying to correct: in the gastrointestinal, respiratory and musculoskeletal systems.


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