Hi Marianne. Welcome.

I have only heard of big birds swallowing large chunks of cuttlebone backing and being harmed. Usually the little guys chew it off in very small bites. More like scraping it rather than breaking it off. You can scrape it off the bone and put small amounts on fresh foods.

 

And I have never seen a mineral block with grit in it.

Did your label say it has grit in it? Every one I have bought has been a hard chalky looking white or pink and I have never seen any grit pieces in it.

Maybe your area sells a different kind that we can get.

 

You can use cooked crushed eggshells as a good calcium source. Cook them in the microwave til just before they start to turn tan. I cook about 2 minutes in my very low power microwave, 600 watts. You'd cook much less time in a high powered one. Cool and crush with the bottom of a glass or a rolling pin. You can sprinkle this on, or mix it in, fresh foods. I have even given eggshells in chunks to finches and they loved to bite little pieces off.

 

I also have bought a powdered calcium. The company is out of business but I am almost certain there is a brand name one out there. Also there is Neo-Calglucon liquid calcium. It is expensive and I think has sweeteners in it. It's sold for children at pharmacies.

Lots of options, including some foods are high in calcium. Kale is one but lots of it will spoil unless your family likes it.

Annie

Yup, Avitec sells Avi-cal. Type it in your browser and it will come up. I have bought a lot of stuff from them and have been very pleased with them.  It does have grit in it plus other sources of calcium so ask if it is all powdered or if it has whole pieces of grit. If powdered it will be safe.

Annie

Are finely ground oyster shells okay to give to parrots as a source of calcium?  Would they be harmful like grit is?  Kathy

I don't know about the other products listed, sorry

What I do is cook the egg shells in the microwave, putting water in a bowl bringing it to a boil, then let them air dry on a paper towel.

From there I put them into the blender, turning them into powder that is sprinkled over their food, and into their soft mixes. I keep the powdered shell in a ziplock bag in the freezer. 

To keep beaks in trim, all the cages have cement perches as well as wooden ones so they can polish and keep them in condition. I also make many of their toys with chunks of wood so they can mangle and destroy for their human pet to clean up later.

Fron the littlest cockatiel to the GW macaw, I haven't had a problem with beaks.

I completely overlooked the beaks question til Copper mentioned it. Are your birds' beaks getting overgrown or are you just trying to prevent that?

I caused an overgrown beak in a  little bronze winged pionus. He ate lots of fresh foods plus pellets as his daily diet. I added vitamins to the fresh food, not realizing it would cause vitamin overdosage. His pellets supplied all the vitamins he needed. His beak got thick and very yellow and overly long. I took him to the vet and as soon as she asked about diet she knew what had happened. I stopped adding vitamins and he was back to normal in just weeks. We did not trim his beak. Just allowed him to wear it down on toys.

Minerals are ok to supplement as you have been doing, and for seed eaters you can add a bit of vitamins to the fresh foods. If pellet fed, no additional vitamins should ever be used.

Annie

 

Good to see you here! 

 

 Looks like your questions have been answered so far.  Keep them coming, we love answering questions.  If we don't know the answers we can help you search for the answers or refer you to someone who might know..... This is a great group.  di

Hi just one more word on overgrown beaks.  Dude (B&G) had to get his beak trimmed by the vet during his last two checkups.  We had the cement-ish  perches on his stand as well as pvc perches.  This stand is the one he eats on when he is with us and we are all eating together.  When his beak got dirty from eating he would use a back and forth motion scraping his upper beak against the cement and essentially he was honing his beak (the way you would a carving knife).  So it got very thin and then he wouldn't use the point when he was chewing up toys but the sides of his beak.  Know we've removed the cement-ish perch and the problem seems solved.  I see him using the point of his beak now and hopefully all his wood toys will help to keep his beak in check (sorry to be so long).

Don't think that you post was too long...... look at some of the book I write!

That's a good point though about sharpening. I see my two honing on the wood. I keep the cement type more for the toes, although they occasionally go after them seriously with their beaks.

I see them polishing more on the ropes and the branches, so I've never had a problem

The big ones can go through 5 pound of wood a week just in shredding too, so that helps to slough the old off. 

I cut a 1 x 4 into 4 inch pieces, drill it and tie it to cage bars. Some of them love to gnaw on it, others would never touch it. Mine are medium size birds so even a 1 x 2 board works well for them. None are heavy chewers but they never have beak problems, thank goodness. My macaw's beak got a tiny bit pointy at times but I filed his with a diamond deb nail file while he was hanging from the inside cage top.

Annie

Thanks everyone I appreciate all the advice.  I just don't know any birdy people,and I thought I knew how to properly care for my little guys myself but whew has the info changed since I first learned!  Yes I  am just trying to ward off any future problems by relearning the basics, years ago my mothers bird had an onergrown beak and the vet she used said he could do a beak trim no problem well three days later little dickie had passed .  So sad! Marianne

Usually the beak trims don't cause them to die unless they get so stressed they have a heart attack. Could be that's what happened to Dickie, although 3 days is a long time after the stress.

 

One thing my vet made all her clients do was to buy our own Dremel grinder inserts. I forgot what those things are called. Anyway she had me buy two kinds. One looks like a little evergreen tree shape. We never used them but had them just in case. She said disease can be passed thru the tools so each bird had to have his own or she wouldn't trim them with the Dremel.

Another vet I used years ago used the same tool on all birds, beaks and toenails, too. I liked him but his techs were so hateful and rude to clients that I dropped him. Why don't doctors control their office personnel? No excuse for that.

Annie

It's so funny you said that about doctors and their staff.  We've been dealing with a urologist all summer since DH had the stone problem but his office and nursing staff were the pits.  Last week was the topper -- they kept us waiting 30 mins while they started looking for test results.  Now, they knew we were coming in for two weeks and why -- shouldn't they have looked for the results before we got there!!!  It was the third incident of something like that and DH had just had enough!

I have bit of experience in this, Joanie. Hubby has been in med practice here for 38 years. I worked in his office filing insurance claims for many years. If any of us had talked to a patient like the vet's girls talked to me, he would have kicked our dumb butts out the very same day.

I encounter this in very few offices but something happened last month that made me really angry. My cardiologist said I had to have a echo immediately. He heard something new with my heart in a checkup. I had it done the next day in his office.  Within 3 days I had the report in my hand, but only because they fax my test results to my hubby. I called the cardio office 3 times in the next month and no one ever explained the test results to me. They never even told the nurse to call me back. Finally, 28 days later the nurse called and I told her what had happened. My test results had been covered up and lost under a stack of papers. She was very upset that my calls had not been transferred to her. She could have looked for them.

I now have her own phone number to call for my results after tests.

Annie

I hate to say it but I think here in NY there are so many people that doctors have more than enough patients and don't care if they lose one here or there.  I mentioned this story at a family gathering and I heard terrible stories about being kept waiting for 3 hours at an orthopedic surgeon's office  ... of having to wait 2 or 3 months for an appointment with a dermatologist ....it seems nuts.  And I have to say that our vet has never kept us waiting more than 15 minutes -- she schedules reasonable amounts of time for each appointment.  Sorry for venting!

It's the same here, Joanie. Too many patients for the doctors to stay on time. My cardio is seldom late seeing me but he does get called to the hospital for cardio emergencies often. I don't mind that because when I have my next heart attack--and it will happen--he will hurry to come see me, too.

If the girls see that he will be late and they can catch us before we have left home, they call to tell us to wait for a while before coming in.  The cardio surgeon who comes here from OKCY has each patient called an hour before he knows he can see them. Good thinking so we don't have to sit for hours down there and can rest at home.

Except for that mixup on my echo I am really happy with these people. They are very considerate of ill people.

We have a huge Indian hospital and outpatient clinic here that needs to learn how to schedule. You have to go there to make an appointment, and then on the day of the appointment you go in very early and sit til your turn. It's a mess down there. People come from miles away and stay all day just to be seen. It's free to our Indian population and they are willing to put up with it just to get medical care.

Annie