The Mikey and Mia Dry Mix is a healthy parrot food combined of over 50 raw fruits, vegetables, flowers, herbs and spices, with no preservatives, no sugar, no soy or peanuts, and no processing other than the freeze-drying process, which retains over 98% of the nutritional value of the ingredients and allows the food to last a long time.
Parrots are delicate beings, who are often dramatically affected by their environment and husbandry in a negative way if owners are not educated on their care needs. Having never been domesticated, we are battling with the fact that parrots have entirely instinctual and wild behaviours, and bodies that are adapted for long flight distances and warm / humid environments. The diet of a wild parrot is varied, and still something that we don’t completely understand. We do understand though, that they would never have access to food that has undergone genetic modification, preservative treatments, or any kind of high heat processing. The food they routinely eat is raw, straight from nature, and as a result they are able to live long healthy lives in the wild, and have the capacity to breed successfully and fly great distances every day.
In captivity, we have come to a point where we have convinced ourselves that parrots should have a bowl of the same food, every single day, without ever changing it up, with a set list of unnatural ingredients that have been pressed together using intense heat, meaning any nutrients that were present, are burnt away.
In order to avoid declining health, expensive and frequent vet visits, and an early death, we should be allowing parrots to experience the life of their wild cousins as much as possible whilst in captivity. This means allowing a bird to fly, (in a safe enclosed environment), allowing a bird to have other bird companions (or a large amount of social time with human family members, not being left alone for long periods of time) and a varied, nutritionally dense diet.
One way to allow your parrot to experience a varied diet, in a convenient and cost effective way, is to feed dry mix parrot food. This form of parrot food lasts a long time and so is better for the budget, encourages natural foraging opportunities, and increases the chances of your parrot ingesting all of their daily nutrient requirements.
So, you’ve purchased a bag of Dry Mix, but how should you give it to your parrot?
Parrots who have been fed a bland and predictable diet for a long time may struggle to understand that a bowl of dry mix parrot food is actually, well, food! To help your parrot understand that what they are seeing is safe and edible, begin by combining something they recognise as tasty in with the dry mix. Even if they don’t touch the many different ingredients they are seeing and only grabbing they food they are used to eating, they are experiencing foraging, which will instantly make this meal time far more exciting and appealing. Hopefully after doing this for a while you parrot will begin to try experimenting with the other ingredients in the bowl, trying new flavours, textures, sizes and colours.
After a while you can begin to remove their old food from the mix, leaving them with a bowl of 50 different food items to try.
Dry Mix can be fed as a complete meal once it has been combined with a diverse seed mix such as the seed mixes we provide with our dry mix bags. It offers all of the nutrients, vitamins and minerals they could ever need, along with an abundance of proteins and healthy fats in their seed mix. Most people like to offer their bowl of dry mix in the evenings, as the parrot’s final meal of the day, however this isn’t the only way to feed a dried chop.
You could also try the following feeding methods:
- Feeding the Dry Mix on it’s own at breakfast time
- Combining the Dry Mix with a fresh wet chop
- Stuffing a foraging toy with Dry Mix
- Mixing two or more different Dry Mix flavours together for an even more diverse blend
- Or by combining some Dry Mix with your parrot’s pellets
We like to encourage people to replace their usual pellets with dry mix, as dry mix is essentially deconstructed pellets. The difference is, with dry mix you can see all of the individual ingredients as they haven’t been ground down to fine powders, and pellets are pressed into shape using heat which removes a huge amount of the nutritional benefit whereas our dry mixes never experience any heat process at all. Pellets also tend to have unnatural things added to them, like spray on additives (an example of this are synthetic vitamins which are not bioavailable however mean the company can officially print ‘contains vitamins’ on the packaging) and in most pellets the main ingredient is corn, which is a filler ingredient. A lot of pellets are treated with appealing colours, a purely cosmetic procedure, which can cause poor behaviour patterns such as screaming, biting and hyper-activeness. Avoid pellets with added sugars, colours and flavours and opt for a more natural pellet if you wish to use them. One that has been cold pressed is even better.
How do you feed your dry mix? Let us know below and be sure to head over to instagram to see discounts and offers before anyone else!
