With enough dedication, you can switch your cockatiel’s seed diet to a much healthier pellet-based diet within a month.

Sounds impossible?

In August of 2022, a group of avian veterinarians offered 3 different diet converting methods to owners of birds of varying species, ages, and genders.

The goal was for the owners to get their birds onto a pellet-based diet using 1 of the 3 methods.

This activity produced some VERY promising results.

By using any 1 of the 3 methods, 96% of birds successfully switched to pellets within 1 month.

And 57.5% of that success happened within the first 7 days!

This article will teach you how to execute those 3 diet conversion methods so your cockatiel can live a long and healthy life.

But first, I want to explain why pellets are healthier for your cockatiel than seeds.

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Quick Navigation:

• Why Pellets Are Healthier For Cockatiels Than Seeds
• Why Your Cockatiel Is Not Eating Pellets
• 3 Evidence-Based Ways To Switch Your Cockatiel From Seeds To Pellets
• 1) “Birdies Choice” Diet Conversion Method
• 2) “Slow & Steady” Pellet Conversion Method
• 3) “Tough Love”
• More Helpful Tips On Cockatiel Pellet Conversion
• Will Cockatiels Starve Themselves?
• Conclusion
• Sources

Why Pellets Are Healthier For Cockatiels Than Seeds

Since you’re looking to convert your cockatiel to a pellet-based diet, you most likely know that seeds are not a healthy diet foundation.

In case you don’t, I’m going to briefly explain why pellets are healthier.

Firstly, high-quality pellets are nutritionally balanced.

They contain almost everything your cockatiel needs to thrive and live a healthy life, which is why all avian nutritionists say to have them as the diet base.

Here are some good brands that make high-quality pellets for cockatiels:

• Roudybush

• Harrisons

• Vetafarm

• Trill

Seeds on the other hand have very low nutritional value.

In fact, seed-only diets have been proven to cause health problems such as fatty liver disease, obesity, and nutrient deficiencies.

These issues are caused by the high-fat and low-nutrient content found in commercial seed mixes.

Of course, seeds still play a large part in the diet of natural seed-eaters, such as cockatiels.

But nutritionally balanced pellets must make up a majority of your cockatiel’s overall diet to ensure they receive all of their essential vitamins and minerals.

Why Your Cockatiel Is Not Eating Pellets

There are many possible reasons why cockatiels avoid or refuse to eat pellets:

• They may not like the texture

• Colour could be discouraging (especially brightly coloured pellets)

• They might prefer a different size

• Or they simply don’t like the brand or taste of the pellets you’re feeding

But one of the more common reasons is because they don’t recognise their new pellets as something edible.

This is especially the case with cockatiels who were fed seed diets their whole life and are only just now being introduced to pellets.

For these birds, the beneficial transition to pellets can be a bit tough.

But using 1 of the 3 pellet conversion methods recommended by avian vets will almost guarantee success for even the fussiest cockatiels.

3 Evidence-Based Ways To Switch Your Cockatiel From Seeds To Pellets

I just want to remind you that 96% of parrots successfully switched to a pelleted diet within a month of implementing any 1 of these 3 diet conversion methods:

• 1) Birdies choice method

• 2) Slow & steady method

• 3) Tough love method

Allow me to explain how to implement each of these methods so you can get started right away!

1) “Birdies Choice” Diet Conversion Method

This tactic required the bird owners to have 3 different types/brands of pellets.

Hence the name of this method is “birdies choice” because the bird gets to choose their pellet.

Each pellet was presented on a tabletop for the bird to inspect, they were then rewarded for positively interacting with or eating any of the 3 pellets.

The birds preferred pellet would slowly be transitioned into their food bowls.

The tabletop test should be done multiple times to be certain about which pellet was favoured.

2) “Slow & Steady” Pellet Conversion Method

This method was pretty simple.

Pellets and familiar foods (seeds) were alternated, presumably in a food bowl, for different amounts of time throughout the day. For example, seeds could be left in the bowl for an hour and then switched out to pellets for the next 2 hours.

Basically, seeds and pellets were continually being switched around throughout the day.

The aim of this method was to expose birds to the sight of pellets being in their dishes.

Successful results were produced within a month of executing this method.

The “slow & steady” method requires the owner to switch between seeds and pellets in the food bowl every hour or two throughout the day, and then stick with this tactic for a month at most.

3) “Tough Love”

The “tough love” pellet conversion method produced much faster results than the other two methods.

This pellet conversion strategy required the owners to provide only a small portion of familiar foods (seeds) for a limited time during the entire day. They also provided multiple dishes of pellets to which the bird had unlimited access.

By limiting seeds and maximising exposure to pellets, the birds switched to pellets very quickly.

If you decide to use this method, you’ll likely need to deal with your cockatiel screaming for their seeds throughout the entire day for multiple days.

Although this is the fastest tactic, it’s also the most difficult to deal with.

It’ll definitely be heartbreaking to put your bird through this, even when it’s for their own good.

All 3 of these pellet conversion strategies have been proven to work very well across many species of parrots within a month of implementation.

A majority (57.5%) of diet conversion success happened within the first 7 days.

Of course, these methods are not the only ways to switch your cockatiel from seeds to pellets.

However, as far as I know, after extensive research, these are the only strategies to have been presented by avian vets and to have their results studied and verified by those same vets.

In other words, there’s more data that suggests these conversion techniques work.

Here’s the source for these 3 strategies and the results.

More Helpful Tips On Cockatiel Pellet Conversion

In this section, I want to give you a few more helpful tips on switching your cockatiel to pellets so you have a few more useful tactics up your sleeve.

Firstly, you could add pellets to your cockatiel’s favourite foraging toy.

Since they forage for seeds in that toy, they’ll likely see the new pellets as something to forage for, which will encourage your bird to eat the pellets when they find them.

Another method is to feed pellets in the morning when your cockatiel is hungriest.

After 12 hours of sleeping, cockatiels often wake up hungry and will usually start eating straight away.

Put the new pellets in their familiar food bowl first thing in the morning, and hopefully, they should start eating them for breakfast.

My third tactic is to show yourself eating pellets to your cockatiel.

Cockatiels are flock birds and they’re very influenced by what their flock members do, if they see you or another bird eating pellets, it’ll encourage them to do the same.

Obviously, you don’t ACTUALLY eat the pellets, you just pretend to.

Try to be very exaggerated with excitement when you eat the pellets as your cockatiel will notice this and think you’re eating the best food ever!

When they see your little performance, they’ll likely beg you to share.

The fourth tip is to prepare the pellets in different ways.

Serving pellets straight from the bag and into the bowl is not the only way to prepare them.

One of the easiest ways to prepare pellets differently is to turn them into a watery mush within the food bowl, topped with a sprinkle of millet to make it more enticing for your cockatiel.

You could also try getting different brands or different sizes of pellets.

Some cockatiels are very picky and will only eat pellets of a specific size, taste, or shape.

My final tip is to use a bridge/transitional food to help switch your cockatiel to pellets.

The aim of a transitional food is to make the switch from seeds to pellets easier with another food that bridges the gap between the seed and pelleted diet.

An ideal food for this is Lafebers Nutri-Berries.

Not only are Nutri-Berries nutritionally balanced like pellets, but they also contain seeds and grains that are heavily desired by cockatiels on a seed-based diet.

In fact, a study done by lafeber concluded that Nutri-berries can be used as a healthy diet base.

So…

If you’re having trouble switching your cockatiel to pellets, your next best option would be to get them to eat Nutri berries, and then from there, you could convert to a pellet-based diet.

Purchase some of Lafebers Nutri-Berries for cockatiels here on Amazon.

Will Cockatiels Starve Themselves?

Before ending this article, I want to help answer this common diet conversion question:

“Will my cockatiel starve to death?”

The short answer is yes, cockatiels can starve themselves.

However, cockatiels can survive 48 hours without food, and their food-searching instincts will kick in way before that.

If they’re starving, they’ll eat anything that they recognise as food.

If they don’t see pellets as food, they could starve themselves unless they work up the courage to try it or they find something else to eat.

According to cockatielcottage, a healthy cockatiel can lose up to 10% of its body weight before becoming ill.

This is why it’s important to regularly weigh your bird if you’re going with any harsh diet converting methods, such as “tough love”.

Evidence of your cockatiel not eating includes smaller and less frequent droppings.

As long as they eat something during the day and they don’t lose more than 10% of their weight, you won’t need to fear starvation.

In other words, it’s perfectly safe to just leave pellets in the bowl for an entire day.

Conclusion

Trying to switch a cockatiel to a pellet-based diet from seeds is not an easy task.

It takes a lot of patience and commitment from you as a responsible bird carer.

Although it’s difficult, transitioning your cockatiel to a more nutritional diet is arguably the best thing you can do for their long-term health.

Many, if not most avian health problems originate from a diet lacking in nutrition.

Here’s a brief outline of a healthy cockatiel diet:

• 40% Pellets

• 30% Budgie seed mix

• 20% Vegetables

• 5% Fruit

• 5% Treats

My avian vet gave me this cockatiel feeding guide in this free handout during my first vet visit:

Once you convert your cockatiel to a pelleted diet using the tips from this article, your next task should be to encourage them to eat vegetables.

When you get to that stage, you should read: 17 Ways To Encourage Your Bird To Try New Foods

Those 17 tips can help you further with converting your cockatiel to pellets as well.

Good luck with your cockatiel and I hope you found all the info in this article helpful toward your diet conversion journey!

Sources

• https://www.cockatielcottage.net/finicky.html
• https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-avian-medicine-and-surgery/ (3 Evidence-based pellet conversion methods)
• https://lafeber.com/pet-birds/switching-from-seeds-to-pellets-or-to-nutri-berries/
• https://birdsupplies.com/pages/how-to-convert-your-parrot-to-pellets
• https://bioone.org/journals/Journal-of-Avian-Medicine-and-Surgery/volume-26/issue-3/2011-025R.1/Nutritional-Levels-of-Diets-Fed-to-Captive-Amazon-Parrots/10.1647/2011-025R.1.short
• https://lafeber.com/pet-birds/nutri-berries-vs-standard-avian-diets/