Be, what in you opinion is a daily diet for an Ekkie? As far as a food source that can be kept in the cage at all times without spoiling.

I feed mine a piece of veggie, a piece of fruit, a leafy green and a small amount of gloop to which I add even more veggies than the other birds get and no beans (the other birds get more protein this time of the year by my adding beans to the gloop). For example, today he got: half a big leaf of romaine (the stalk part which is the only part he has recently started eating), a piece of mango (about one sixth of the whole fruit); a piece of cucumber (also about one sixth -I cut the large ones in three pieces and cut these in half to expose the inside with the seeds) and less than a quarter cup of pizza flavor gloop (brown and wild rice, barley, hard red winter wheat, triticale, oat groats, amaranth, sesame and flax seeds, sweet potatoes, corn, green peas, carrots -cooked and raw, wax and green beans, broccoli, sun dried tomatoes, black olives, red and green pepper flakes, paprika, garlic, crushed red pepper and a little bit of vegetarian pepperoni) and, for dinner, he got about one eight of a cup of ABBA parrot seed mix, one roasted pistachio and one roasted peanut (one single peanut not a big shell with several peanuts inside and no salt, of course). The other birds get garbanzo beans with their gloop and less veggies, Romeo gets more carrots, peas, broccoli, and green and wax beans than they do because he needs the extra fibre. He still looks for seeds all day long, the poor thing, and goes crazy at dinner time... he actually dances from one foot to the other, goes round and round and rolls his head, he is so impatient to get it. He still misses his seeds a lot because he was free fed seeds, fruity pellets and nothing else unless you count an occasional piece of donut or something equally unhealthy as food for years and searches for some all day long, foraging all over the floor, trying to get into the canaries cages to steal theirs, etc. But that is good because it forces him to move from one place to another and it distracts him from his plucking.

Leigh, I've still been researching protein.

Clinical Avian Medicine
Greg Harrison, Teresa Lightfoot

The entire document is a good read.

Chapter 4 - Page 89 (6th. page) through 90 in this PDF document, has some good information about protein;

Attached Files

Nutrition I.pdf (746.9 KB, 5 views)

Leigh if you're still looking into protein, I found another article. Good informational paragraph on protein and feathers.

The entire article can be read here;

LINK: http://www.drmacs.com/ProteinRequirementsofBirds.pdf

Karen, generic information on protein is good but you need to take into consideration that different species have different requirements. Natural seed eaters (i.e. passerines and columbines) and partial seed eaters (i.e. keets and tiels) have livers designed to process more protein without suffering any damage but canopy eaters eat mostly plant material and their livers cannot stand processing high protein all the time.

We know that ekkies, in particular, happen to have a very long intestine compared to other species, that means that they require more fibre and less protein (rule of thumb is the shorter the intestine, the higher in protein the natural diet is -usually meat; the longer and more coiled, the more vegetal matter the animal eats). We also know they have very soft beaks (soft beaks mean soft food like fruits, hard beaks mean hard food like nuts). The natural diet of an eclectus is mainly fruits, unripe nuts, flower and leaf buds with very few seeds. That, in my opinion, translates into low protein, low fat, high fibre and a relatively high fructose and glucose intake compared to other psittaforms. What the exact percentage of these should be I don't know, I've never been able to find a reliable study done on this. I've only found a single account of eclectus observed in the wild and the writer says they stay away from people so they were not able to actually observe their diet ecology but the region produces mango, star fruit (sour sap), pomelo (like a grapefruit, more or less), paupau, laulau and bananas and they do know they eat a lot of sugar cane, corn and some green nuts that only grow locally. Whatever we make out of this is conjecture but, based on what we do know, in my personal opinion, ekkies require a low protein diet and the source of protein should be cooked legumes and whole grains which provide protein in a soft medium without the high oil of the seeds.