​Bird supplements - which is best? In water or on food?

Bird supplements - which is best? In water or on food

For a supplement to work well for your birds once mixed into the drinking water, it is important that all the ingredients in it are water soluble so they dissolve and spread evenly throughout the liquid. If the ingredients are not water soluble, they will settle out at the bottom and the birds will not gain any benefit from them. Expensive for you and no value to your bird!

But not all the useful ingredients come in nice soluble forms. Or sometimes they can be obtained in soluble form but at a cost many times the price of the non-soluble version, a cost many customers do not want to pay. In these cases, a non-soluble product which gets mixed into food may be better. Methionine, which is great at speeding up moults, dissolves in water but often smells disgusting like rotting cabbage therefore we put this in our on-food version.

Another consideration is that birds eating lots of moist foods obtain most of their liquid needs this way and so have little desire to drink water. Think parrots eating chopped fruits. So if you put supplements in the water, it is again expensive for you and no value to the birds. The answer is to mix 'on-food' supplements into their finely chopped fruit, soaked seed or eggfood.

For budgerigars in stock flights it is often good to put supplements in the eggfood AND in the water, as the less dominant birds will not get too much of the eggfood, but will manage to drink at some point.

Learn more about on food bird supplements - CLICK HERE

Learn more about water soluble supplements - CLICK HERE