You sound like me, with everything you feed, with the exception of meat. Meat makes up about 30-50% of my vasa's diet, depending on the time of the year. But vasa diet requires a decent amount of meat.

No need for Bea to write out the process for her gloop. This link Bea's Gloop will give you an pretty good overview of that.

When not feeding my birds gloop, I use a few organic pellets as a base for all the fresh stuff I put in their dishes. A couple of my birds are very attached to pellets, especially my damaged one, and as her diet is limited, I am glad for that.

The thing to remember with gloop is that you need to make sure that the rice and legumes need to be thoroughly cooked while the grains do not so the concoction retains texture (birds don't like it when it's mushy and sticky). Another trick is to drain everything you add so, when you are adding say cooked green beans to it, you need to drain them and squeeze them real hard in your hand so as to get as much water as possible out of them.

Also, gloop is a generic name, there is no set recipe, I am constantly changing mine and you can improvise as much as you want with it. I used to freeze it already made with all the different flavors of the day but I am now only freezing the cooked grain/rice/legume/tomatoes/green base recipe and adding the veggies/fruits/spices to small batches of two to three days because I've discovered that some of my birds would only eat it with gusto when it's freshly made. It's a bit more work but what the heck...

And, Kimga, as to meat... well, we disagree on that. I believe that meat is not good for birds unless they are birds of prey or scavengers, made carnivorous by nature. There is no single species of psittacines that was evolved to eat meat, if they were, their beak would not be the typical psittaform beak made to eat vegetal material. None of my birds eat it and they are all very healthy with values always better than the accepted normal range. Animal meat is not only too high in protein (the number one destroyer of liver and kidneys) and fat (bad fat, fat that cloggs arteries and brings on strokes and heart attacks), it is also loaded with chemical from all the antibiotics and stuff they feed the cattle (unless you are buying organic, all natural, all vegetarian diet, free range chicken and beef). I would reconsider your vasa's diet if I were you, Kimba, because, in the wild, vasas eat mostly fruits and, as I always say, when in doubt, look to Mother Nature for the answer. She always knows best.

I disagree! Jean (Sun Conure) loves my sticky rice and I often have to chase him away from my plate with chopsticks when I think he's making too big of a mess.

Actually vasa's can and do hunt in the wild, (also vasa's have been re homed due to hunting the smaller birds of the house, this happened once with my painted conure, Eve snatched her right out of the air) and most captive vasa unless feed meat are aggressive and when there blood is tested they show a protien deficiency. Lesser vasa's however are primarily fruit eaters, but even so breeders of lesser vasa have noticed that unless they were fed animal protien while raising chicks the babies were stunted. After 6 years of research into the species as well as talking to Dr. Ekstrom, (ornithologist who has done a three year study on them) I must disagree with you.

Sorry forgot to add that vasa are not the only parrot to resort to hunting and eat animal protien in their diet, like the Kea for instance...the following taken from wickepdia....

An omnivore, the Kea feeds on more than 40 plant species (Tab. 1), beetle larva, other birds (including shearwater chicks) and mammals (including sheep and rabbits).

I am no expert on every single species of parrots there are and know very little about keas but I understand that although there is a lot of anecdotal references to them hunting sheep, there are many people that are unconvinced (me been one of them although, of course, my opinion does not count at all).

In my personal experience, all psittacines and most vegetarian birds will gladly eat meat if offered. They all crave protein and fat and that is all that meat is. Your regular supermarket chickens are raised on it, parakeets will eat it, pigeons will eat it, cockatiels will eat it and let's not even go into the larger species, they just love it! Even birds which will die within a few years if fed a high animal protein diet (like eclectus) absolutely adore it. I had one that had been fed chicken leg bones for years before she came to me, she used to crack the bone and scoop the marrow out...

As to psittacine chicks been born defective if parents are not fed meat, I am sorry but I find that very hard to believe. Do you happen to know exactly what the defect was? Was it ever diagnosed? You just say stunted and that, in my experience is due to avitaminosis and/or hypocalcium because, regardless of how much cuttlebone or mineral block they eat, makes no difference because birds cannot absorb calcium if they don't have vitamin D3 in their system, which they cannot produce unless they are exposed to direct sunlight, something most pet or breeding parrots just don't get. Vitamin D3 is found only in animal meat and not in any vegetal so, yes, meat will take care of that problem but it will also end up damaging their livers and kidneys if fed on a regular basis. And we all know the failure of those two organs along with their respiratory system are the major causes of early death in captive birds.

All vegetarian birds will eat an occasional insect or even feed off a fresh kill (Grays have been reported doing this) but that doesn't make them carnivorous. They are opportunistic feeders and will eat anything that is available to them but they just don't have that many chances of getting animal protein in nature. They would need to be able to hunt for that and they just don't have the 'equipment' for it.

As to larger birds killing little birds, yes, it is unfortunately very common but I think it has to do with caging them. I have several different species all living together in harmony, even species that everybody said could not cohabit (like U2s and keets, for example) do it in my birdroom without a single problem. There are birds that do not recognize themselves as birds and fear and hate other birds and will attack them for no reason at all (the same eclectus I mentioned before was one of those, she was rehomed to a family where she is the only bird and she is very happy there). And, of course, there are just plain mean birds (same as there are plain mean people :-)...

My IRN hunt frogs should one accidentally get into the aviary. `Maybe just opportunistic, and they only the very tiny frogs that can fit though the mesh.

Really - that's interesting

We should get millions of tiny frogs soon, we have had a lot of rain so they will be tadpoles and soon frogs. I will try remember pictures.