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There seems to be a resurgence of people recommending that you feed your pet bird mealworms. I don’t know why…these people seem to come around in cycles.

We were introduced to mealworms several years ago. A salesman called us up. At that time we were at the biggest stage of running our aviary, and did some advertising. That usually brings the salesmen to us. We were already aware of mealworms, but just barely.

This guy told us that pet birds LOVE mealworms. After all, wild birds eat them all of the time, and captive birds would greatly benefit from the protein they supply to the diet. Well….OK, that sounded reasonable.

He gave us a box of samples, and some literature, and basically was trying to get us to push his product on our customers. Again, this was reasonable request. But since I was the main nutritionist for our aviary, I needed to be more convinced. So I experimented for the next few weeks with feeding mealworms.

My first “test subject” was my breeding pair of African Grays. Since their diet required lots of protein, especially for breeders, they would probably love to try them. They took one look at their food dish, saw that it had a bunch of crawling bugs in it, screamed and ran into their breeding box. It took several hours to get them to return to the food dish again.

The only birds that seemed even a bit interested in mealworms were my finches, and even with those birds we had mixed results.

WHAT ARE MEALWORMS?

Mealworms are the larvae of the darkling, or flour beetles. They are not really “worms”, but the larvae just before turning into beetles (after about 10 weeks). They are an excellent source of protein, which is severely lacking in many fruit and seed diets that wild birds are accustomed to. Therefore, wild birds look to insects to supplement their diet. And mealworms are mighty tasty to them.

They are very easy to grow. Generally, fill up a box with rolled oats, toss in some slices of apple, potato, or carrots, and add some mealworms. They can also be purchased in a freeze-dried state. These are commonly sold in pet stores, and are used mostly for reptile and fish food. But home-grown mealworms are very popular for feeding wild birds. But since captive pet birds were never introduced to them, they are generally fed by their parents, or hand fed a powered formula by their breeders. Foraging for insects never quite got into their education.

Mealworms come in a variety of sizes. Small ones are ½ inch, and will grow to as much as an inch in size. The very large sizes are just common mealworms that are treated with a growth hormone that prevents them from developing into beetles, and grow even larger!

If you want to try your birds out on mealworms, what I would suggest is getting a small quantity of them. If your bird shows an interest in them, grow your own. They are a little expensive to buy, but since they are easy to grow yourself you can keep a never ending supply of them on hand.

The main advantage of mealworms is the high protein they supply. Most captive birds do not require such a high amount. The birds that seem to eat them are soft billed birds, such as Finches and Canaries. These types of birds love the small seed diets, like millet. Since these seeds lack a not of nutritional value, you need to supplement their diet with whatever you can find. If they will eat mealworms, that’s great!

But for other birds, I have not found any great advantage of feeding mealworms. They will have an easier time eating other sources of protein. The expense and trouble of feeding mealworms does not justify making this a major portion of their diet. If your bird will eat them, give it a try. But I wouldn’t try changing their diet over.