A little extra help
Whether you’re aiming for healthy birds for their own sake, or as a facet of competitive advantage, you’ll want to offer your stock the latest and best-researched additions to a basic diet. Here Cage & Aviary Birds offers a starter’s guide to the world of dietary supplements
THE traditional first meaning of “supplements”, as applied to avian diet, concerns the vitamins and their balanced provision in that diet.
From human nutrition, we all know that vitamins come in lettered groups, and the main ones related to bird health are A, B, D, E and K. When it comes to the function and efficacy of vitamins, you can get as far as you like into the minutiae, although for many of us the detail is not especially enlightening. However, among the must-know vitamin functions are:
■ Vitamin B: this helps to regulate energy within the bird’s body.
■ Vitamin D: this one governs the absorption of calcium into the body. Of critical importance to breeding hens.
The norm nowadays for fanciers is to include a generic multi-vitamin as the basis of the supplementary régime. namely the phenomenon of over-fitness. If you haven’t experienced this before, it’s one to avoid: this is when parents have absorbed too much of one or more vitamins and become pumped up to mate, build and lay again.
