Ask Lafeber

Infertile eggs

I have a pair dna tested African greys I give them their box in march they do their business but the eggs are not fertile their diet is seed vegetables fruit and pellets they were both to the vet a couple months prior for check up blood work shows they are healthy no issues the female sets on the eggs the male feeds her I did notice that when they do their business the female grabs a hold of the side of cage not sure if this could be problem I have tried different perch’s they are both 11 years old thank you

Hi,

Parrots are very hard to breed in captivity. You can do everything right, and still never get results. It’s hard to know why the eggs are infertile. One thing I would do is take away the seeds. Seeds are just junk food with little nutritional value. Even if nutrients are added, they are lost when the bird removes the hull from the seed. A parrot will overeat on seeds because they are not feeling satisfied, so they keep eating more and more and end up getting fat and developing heart disease. The pellets are nutritionally balanced and should be 80% of their diet. If you want to off whole seeds, you can give them our foraging diets. Our Nutri-Berries, Pellet-Berries, and Avi-cakes are balanced the same as a pellet, but the ingredients are not ground up. We only use fresh, human grade seeds with the hulls removed, combined with other ingredients, and coated with a nutritionally balanced binder so that the bird gets complete nutrition in every bite. Since the hulls have been removed, the birds get all of the nutrition.

Breeding birds need a lot of privacy, and checking on them a lot can disrupt things. They also need to be fully flighted and should have a fairly large cage with room to fly. Again, you may do everything right and never get results. One of the birds may simply be sterile. All you can do is let them keep trying and hope one day the eggs are fertile.

Thank you for asking Lafeber,

Brenda