Recipes | Parakeets | Guide

There are as many recipes as there are parakeet keepers. From the food lists given elsewhere in this guide, you can see that budgerigars are an obligingly omnivorous species. The trick here is to learn the basic method required for each type of recipe. It’s a bit like pizza: you don’t need a big book of pizza recipes - once you know about dough, mozzarella and tomato sauce, you’ve cracked it.

Tempt those tastebuds with your own parakeet food recipes!

If you want to combine ingredients into salads, cakes, kebabs, or any other concoction you think will appeal to the birds’ inner gourmet, there are hundreds of recipes available in online forums. The variety is illusory, however, and there are just five basic types, with endless variation:

Parakeet salad mixes - a combination of wet stuff (fruit and veg), sprouting seeds and/or dry seeds. Serve in a bowl or feeder for general browsing.
Parakeet cakes and breads - there’s no added benefit in providing food in loaf form, but if you enjoy baking for your birds, go ahead! Organic wheat or maize flour mixed with grains, nuts and a little baking powder, bound together with water, is the basis.
Parakeet biscuits/cookies - as above, but without the baking powder.
Parakeet treats - these are simply dry seed bound together with egg white.
Parakeet egg food, or high-protein mix - this should be served if your birds are nesting, or at times of molt or other stress (a trip to the vet, or moving to a new cage or aviary, for example). Boiled egg, mashed into a mixture of seeds and chopped veg, is the basis. Pulverized parakeet pellets will add the full range of vitamins and minerals to the mix. If there is no nesting, feather-growing or stress in your cages, don’t offer this kind of high-protein mix more than once a week.

It’s best to avoid sticky foods such as soups and oatmeal, and these haven’t been included in our list. Parakeets don’t like getting their beaks gummed up, so there’s no point winding them up with messy food. This hasn’t prevented a proliferation of sticky recipes online, of course!

The most important rule in making healthy recipes for parakeets is to avoid the toxic foodstuffs mentioned in the Parakeet Foods to Avoid section. Many of the recipes you will see online include inappropriate ingredients, so beware.

The following basic recipes should be used as templates. Add and take away as you please, referring to the Parakeet Food sections of this guide.