I've been introducing our new adoptee Kiko to fresh and keeping an eye on her weight for a little over a week and a half. For the last five years or so she's been on a cheap cockatiel seed diet... bleck. I've been DYING to try the seed conversion pinned here but I wanted to make sure I knew her baseline weight after she settled in and I was a little concerned that because she'd never been offered pellets to the best of my knowledge that she wouldn't recognize them as something edible and the stress of thinking that she was slowly being starved to death would end up in more feather plucking.

I was curled up on the couch watching TV with the boyfriend (The "So You Think You Can Dance Canada" finale! OMG) and I could hear her crunching away at something and when I snuck a peek over the arm of the couch she was chest deep in her pellet bowl!

I GOT HER!

Tomorrow I go shopping for the ingredients for birdie bread and it's CONVERSION TIME!

Here's hoping I never have to give money to anyone for that yucky seed again. Unless, of course, it's for the outside chickadees during the winter.

thats awsome!! was really quick to!! my tiel took 9 months to convert *rolls eyes*

*chuckles* I haven't tried taking her seed away yet. This may still take a lot longer. I'm just not going to believe the "I'm STARVING" act when I know she has at least ingested a couple of those pellets. I have been putting a small amount of the zupreem natural pellets in her morning oatmeal, tossed a couple into her seed dish, and I bought a small bag of the fruity zupreem that a bunch of people on the forum seem to have had success with and mixed some colour into the plain stuff to get her attention. Here's to hoping that by next molt her feathers all come in cleanly and with a little better colour. They're a bit on the "brown based green" right now between the stress and the icky diet.