Birdseed

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Blue tit on a tit ball
Only a wide variety of seeds keep the canary reasonably healthy.
Budgie birdseed mix

Birdseed is used to feed or supplement birds. A distinction must be made between bird food for wild birds - see winter feeding  - and birds kept as pets or zoo animals.

Birdseed is one of the ways in which the wormwood ragweed, a dreaded allergy trigger, is spread . The consumer magazine Ökotest therefore recommends refraining from feeding wild birds.

Many bird feed mixes contain hemp seeds to keep the plumage and the bird overall healthy. Thanks to an intervention by the birdseed manufacturers before the US Congress in 1937, where they asserted: "Without hemp seeds, the birds will not sing," an exemption was obtained in the USA allowing sterilized hemp seeds to be added. The addition of certain seeds is essential for certain birds, such as canaries, in order to ensure an adequate supply of essential fatty acids. In particular, the unique combination of linoleic acid , α-linolenic acid , gamma-linolenic acid and some other essential acids is of crucial importance for bird health.

In zoological gardens, the institutes usually put together their own feed mixes which are optimized for the respective species.

Private bird keepers, on the other hand, usually purchase feed that is industrially prefabricated. The manufacturers claim that these mixtures actually guarantee an optimal supply. For most parrot species, there are no exact research results as to the quantities and proportions in which they ingest their vital components with their food. It is therefore important to offer the birds the opportunity to meet their needs as well as possible through a varied selection.

There are own mixes for:

Agroscope found transgenic oilseed rape in five of 161 grain mixtures examined and one contained ragweed seeds.

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: Bird food  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

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  1. Bird food finger away Bavarian Minister of Health warns. (PDF) (No longer available online.) ÖKO-TEST, formerly in the original ; accessed on April 16, 2018 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.oekotest.de
  2. Quickly informed - valuable information in hemp seeds. In: Wissen-Gesundheit.de. Accessed on December 14, 2017 : "In the last few decades, hemp seeds have mainly been produced as bird feed."
  3. The History of Hemp in the Early 20th Century. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 29, 2013 ; accessed on December 14, 2017 (an exemption applies to birdseed manufacturers).
  4. Components of grain feed & straight feed. In: nymphensittich-wegweiser.net. Retrieved on December 14, 2017 (Feed components: seeds and other dry feed with a photo and their essential nutrients - not only for cockatiels).
  5. ^ Yearbook of the St. Gall Science Society . 1866, p. 211 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  6. Feed: 63% meet requirements. In: schweizerbauer.ch . August 8, 2019, accessed August 17, 2019 .