What to Feed a Cockatoo: A Complete Diet Guide

A healthy cockatoo diet is built on formulated pellets, with fresh vegetables and greens every day and a smaller layer of quality seed. Pellets should make up roughly 75 to 80% of what your bird eats, vegetables and a little fruit most of the rest, and seed a modest top-up rather than the meal. Fresh water goes down daily.

"Cockatoo" covers a lot of birds, from the small cockatiel to the large sulphur-crested cockatoo, galah and corella. The diet principles here apply across the group, and portion sizes and pellet size scale with the bird. Galahs and corellas have their own guides, since both are especially prone to weight gain.

Cockatoos are among the most intelligent parrots kept as pets, and they live a very long time, commonly 40 to 70 years and sometimes more. A bird that clever and that long-lived needs to work for its food. In the wild it spends hours foraging. At home, a heaped bowl of seed left out all day is the opposite, and boredom is a leading cause of the screaming and feather-plucking cockatoos are known for.

So spread food out, hide it, and make your bird forage. A foraging feeder like the Seed Cube puts the food behind a clear panel your cockatoo has to reach into, which slows eating, keeps the mind busy and contains the mess. Feed a good diet through foraging and you fix nutrition and behaviour at the same time.

The most common cockatoo diet mistake is a bowl of seed, usually heavy on sunflower and peanuts. Birds pick out those fatty favourites and leave the rest, so the diet ends up high in fat and short on calcium, vitamin A and other nutrients. Over a long cockatoo life that leads to obesity, fatty liver disease, high cholesterol and hardened arteries (atherosclerosis).

It also drives fatty tumours. Lipomas, soft fatty lumps under the skin, are most common in overweight birds on high-fat seed diets, and sulphur-crested cockatoos and galahs are among the species most prone to them. The good news: caught early, many respond to a switch to a lower-fat, balanced diet.

Formulated pellets are the base of a good cockatoo diet because each pellet carries balanced nutrition, so your bird cannot pick out the fatty bits. Aim for pellets to be about 75 to 80% of daily food. Choose a pellet made for larger parrots or cockatoos, such as Vetafarm or Lafeber ranges, and match the pellet size to your bird.

If your cockatoo is on seed now, do not switch overnight. Mix pellets in with the seed and lift the ratio slowly over weeks. Offer pellets first thing in the morning when your bird is hungriest, and weigh your bird through the change. If it loses more than about 10% of its body weight, slow down and talk to your vet.

Fresh vegetables and leafy greens do the job seed cannot, and they target the two things seed diets lack most: vitamin A and calcium. For vitamin A, offer dark leafy greens, carrot, capsicum and sweet potato. For calcium, kale, broccoli and bok choy help, along with a cuttlebone in the cage.

Skip pale, watery vegetables like iceberg lettuce and celery, which add little. Wash everything well and cut it to a size your bird can handle. Offer vegetables in a separate dish and clear them after a couple of hours so they do not spoil, especially in warm weather.

Seed is not banned. Cockatoos enjoy it, and a quality seed mix has a place as the smaller layer of a balanced diet, roughly the part left after pellets and vegetables. The key is choosing a better blend and keeping the portion modest. A mix made for the larger cockatoos, like the Forage Gourmet Galah, Corella and Cockatoo blend, avoids loading up on sunflower.

Treat sunflower seeds, peanuts and nuts as occasional rewards, not the daily fill. They are useful for training or foraging games in small amounts, but they are exactly the high-fat foods that cause the trouble when they become the meal.

Some foods are dangerous and should never reach your cockatoo. Avocado and onion are toxic to birds. Chocolate, anything with caffeine (coffee, tea, cola) and alcohol are all off-limits. So are salty, sugary and heavily processed human snacks like chips, biscuits and lollies.

Go easy on fruit generally, since it is high in sugar, and remove apple seeds and stone-fruit pits. Dairy is not toxic but birds do not digest it well, so keep it to tiny amounts if at all. When in doubt, leave it out.

Change the diet gradually. A sudden switch can leave a stubborn cockatoo refusing to eat, which is dangerous. Introduce pellets alongside the current seed, lift the pellet share week by week, and hold back sunflower and peanuts. Use morning hunger to your advantage, and try grinding pellets over a favourite moist food if your bird ignores them at first.

Weigh your bird through the change and watch its droppings and energy. If it drops more than about 10% of its weight, or you are dealing with an overweight bird or one with lumps, get an avian vet involved before you go further. For the full picture on housing, health and behaviour, see our Cockatoo Care Guide.