Recipes | Budgies | Guide

There are as many recipes as there are budgie 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.

Cater for all tastes with your own budgie 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:

Budgie 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.
Budgie 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.
Budgie biscuits/cookies - as above, but without the baking powder.
Budgie treats - these are simply dry seed bound together with egg white.
Budgie egg food, or high-protein mix - this should be served if your birds are nesting, or at times of moult 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 budgie 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 porridges, and these haven’t been included in our list. Budgies don’t like getting their beaks messy, 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 budgies is to avoid the toxic foodstuffs mentioned in the Budgie Foods to Avoid section, above. 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 Budgie Food sections of this guide.