It is interesting to see how opinions about what is good for parrots changes with time. Before we could buy birdseed mixes and pellets, people just fed ordinary human food to parrots and they seemed to do fine with it. On the other hand, people were eating mostly homemade food back then.

Then somebody came up with the idea that parrots should eat seeds, so many parrot owners started to feed their birds a seed diet exclusively, which caused many undernourished birds. Then came pellets, which when added to the diet was an improvement . because it increased the spectrum of nutrition. But because birds did better with this variety, owners were advised to switch to feeding only pellets to their birds.

And so it goes on and on. Today, there are still people who think that a parrot should not get any bird seed mix or pellets, but only fresh food.

There are about 300 species of parrots from five different continents living in a wide variety of climates and vegetation. Most of them do eat seeds in their natural environment. Some are ground feeders, which means they spend a good amount of their time on the ground eating seeds. But even the ones that live in the canopy of the forest graze on seeds. Every plant produces seeds or nuts that drop to the ground to reproduce and keep the species going. Guess who is feeding on this kind of seeds and nuts when they are still on the plant? The animals, including parrots.

So, the question should not be if birdseed mixes are bad or good for parrots, but rather, “how much to feed to a species?” A parrot eating a variety of foods like seed mixes, pellets, fresh vegetables and nuts is usually a healthy bird.