Feeding Parrots Healthy Without the “Mess”

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Camelot Macaw

A huge concern of mine when beginning our contract with Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, was how to get the birds to eat healthy while traveling on the road. All I could think was… it’s going to be soooo messy, and what if mold starts growing because we can’t clean fast enough or good enough.

The first solution? Tupperware!

Blue throated macaw, Camelot macaw, Military macaw

Ever since I started feeding my birds out of tupperware, it has made my life a lot easier! I can literally put all the foods I want to give them in the bowl, then whatever they don’t eat I can put a lid on and store for later.

Camelot Macaw

The second solution? Not feeding them fresh foods in their travel cages.

Travel cages get so much messier than large cages (aviaries, indoor large cages, etc) and will grow mold faster as it is easy to miss and if the bird has to be in it until you have something else set up… you can’t exactly clean that easily. It just makes life a lot harder and unhealthier for the bird.

We made a rule that the birds only get fresh foods OUTSIDE of cages and in the 10×10 tent or in their semi-permanent aviary to forage. Mostly though, I like to give it to them in our tent so I can see how much they’re eating of what.

Their first few meals were green beans, beets and bananas. They were loving it all!

Military Macaw

One thing I wanted to make sure to do was since I knew Comet, my camelot macaw, loves green beans and isn’t as fond of beets is I made sure lots of beet juice got on the green beans so they had some of the beet flavoring on them to get Comet to eat more of the beets. I wanted him to get more of a taste for them since he was the most resistant to the beets in the first place. This worked really well for me and he ended up eating quite a lot of the beets as he ate the green beans.

These two things have helped us travel with our birds in a more clean way, and still be able to offer nutritional value to their diets.