The most important thing you can do to keep your companion bird healthy and content is to feed it right. In fact, proper feeding takes priority over all other aspects of avian care.

But the vast amount of nutritional information available to the pet bird owner today — through the Internet, pet shops, commercial advertisements, or other bird owners — can be conflicting, contradictory or even completely inaccurate. At the very least, it can be confusing, which makes it difficult to make the right decisions when it comes to your bird’s health.

For centuries, it has been traditional for people to feed seeds to wild birds at backyard feeders. So when birds started to become popular as pets, this seemed to be the logical food, right? Well, no, according to well-known avian veterinarian Greg Harrison from Green Acres, Fla., who is board-certified in Avian Practice in both the United States and Europe. Harrison says a diet of seeds alone lacks up to 32 essential nutrients, leading to malnutrition in captive birds. And malnutrition is the leading cause of over 90 percent of health problems and death in pet birds — 90 percent!

Malnutrition involves all of the systems of the body and is seen as: abnormalities in body weight and shape; unusual appearances of feathers, nails, beak and skin; undesirable behavior; and disturbances in the all the systems of the body. Nutritional deficiencies appear to accelerate the aging process of birds, primarily through the loss of moisture and tissue elasticity.