What to Feed a Finch: A Complete Diet Guide

A finch does best on a small-seed base with fresh food beside it every day. Here is the whole diet in one glance.

• A quality small-seed mix of millets and canary seed as the everyday base. Cap it at about one level teaspoon per bird per day.
• Fresh leafy greens or finely chopped vegetables every day, in their own dish.
• Egg food or sprouted seed a few times a week, and daily through the moult and breeding season.
• A finch crumble or small pellet to cover the vitamins and minerals seed cannot supply.
• A cuttlebone for calcium, and clean water changed every day.

If you keep more than one finch, give each bird its own dish, or use a dish wide enough for several to feed at once. Finches feed in company, and a dominant bird will otherwise hold the bowl.

This is the most useful thing to understand about feeding finches, and most guides skip past it in a sentence.

A finch does not swallow seed whole. It holds each seed, splits the shell, swallows the kernel and drops the empty husk straight back into the dish. Within a day the bowl can look completely full and hold almost no food. The RSPCA method for measuring how much seed a bird actually eats begins by blowing the husks off the dish first, precisely because the dish lies to you.

That matters more for a finch than for a parrot. A finch weighs 10 to 16 grams, burns energy quickly for its size and carries almost no reserve. A bird this small goes downhill in hours rather than days, and it will hide the fact until it is nearly too late.

The same habit causes two more problems that almost nobody connects to it. Vitamin-coated seed loses most of its coating with the shell, so a fortified mix largely fortifies the bin. And powdered supplements sprinkled over dry seed end up in the bottom of the dish with the husks, which is why vets tell you to put powders on moist food instead.

Fix the husk and you fix all three. Tip or blow the husks off every morning before topping the dish up, and check that what is left is actually seed. A feeder that keeps husks out of the seed column, rather than letting them settle on top, does the same job with less daily fiddling.

Seed is not the enemy for a finch the way it is for a lorikeet. Wild finches are grass-seed specialists and a good mix belongs in the diet. The problem is what happens when seed is the entire diet.

Two things go wrong. First, commercial mixes usually hold only a handful of seed types, they run high in fat, and they are not the seeds wild finches actually eat. Second, given a choice, a finch eats its one or two favourites and leaves the rest, so even a varied mix ends up narrow. Millet sprays and honey sticks are the extreme version of this: birds love them, and they deliver very little beyond energy.

Look for a mix built on a range of millets with canary seed, keep it airtight and buy quantities you will get through. Seed goes stale, and stale seed loses what little vitamin content it had.

For scale on the fat question, sunflower seed runs about 49 per cent fat, roughly three times a chocolate bar. Finch mixes are not sunflower-heavy, but the same principle applies to any oil seed that creeps into the bowl.

Fresh food goes in every day, in its own dish, chopped small enough for a bird the size of your thumb. The RSPCA sorts bird vegetables by colour, which is an easy way to keep variety without keeping a spreadsheet.

• Green: silver beet, broccoli, peas, beans, dandelion, milk thistle.
• Yellow: corn, grated carrot, sweet potato, pumpkin.
• Red: capsicum, beetroot.

Seeding grass heads are the closest thing to a wild finch's natural food, and most finches go straight for them. Only pick from ground you know has not been sprayed.

Fruit is a treat rather than a food group. All fruit is high in sugar, so keep portions tiny and lean towards low-GI options such as apple, pear or kiwi fruit rather than watermelon. Wash everything, and take uneaten fresh food out the same day before it spoils.

Seed and greens do not carry enough protein for a moulting or breeding finch. Growing a full set of feathers is expensive, and a hen producing eggs needs protein and calcium at the same time.

Egg food is the standard answer: a commercial egg and biscuit mix, or hard-boiled egg mashed with its shell and offered fresh for a couple of hours only. Sprouted seed is the other cheap upgrade, since sprouting lifts the nutritional value of the same seed you already buy. Rinse sprouts well and throw out anything that smells sour.

Some finches also take live food such as small mealworms or fly pupae, particularly when rearing chicks, and others largely ignore it. Offer a little and watch what happens rather than assuming.

Through the moult and the breeding season, move egg food from a few times a week to daily. Outside those periods, ease it back, because a constant high-protein diet encourages a pair to keep breeding.

Formulated food is where finch advice and parrot advice part company, and it is worth being honest about it.

Vets are clear that seed alone is not a complete diet, and most put formulated food at roughly 60 to 70 per cent of the diet for birds generally. Veterinary guidance for finches specifically is that formulated food should be the bulk of the diet, with fresh produce and a smaller share of seed alongside. Crumbles are the practical format, because a pellet sized for a parrot is no use to a 12 gram bird. Vetafarm Finch & Budgie Crumbles is the extruded crumble we stock for exactly this job.

The catch is conversion. A mature finch raised on seed can be very hard to change over, and a finch has no margin for a hunger strike. Never swap cold turkey.

The RSPCA method works well and is deliberately slow.

1. Measure what your birds actually eat. Measure the seed in, blow the husks off 24 hours later, measure what is left, and repeat for three or four days.
2. Offer that same amount of seed, mixed with an equal amount of crumble and thawed mixed vegetables, worked into an even mash so nothing can be picked out.
3. Take a pinch of seed out each day. Most birds are eating the new food within two to three weeks.

Watch them daily while you do it, and weigh small birds if you can. Small black droppings, or droppings that are all white, mean the bird is not eating. Put seed back immediately, and call an avian vet if it does not pick up within a few hours.

Two different products both get called grit, and they do completely different jobs. Confusing them is a common and occasionally dangerous mistake.

Insoluble grit is stone or quartz. Its job is to grind seed in the gizzard for birds that swallow seed whole, such as pigeons and doves. A finch shells its seed before swallowing it, so it does not need insoluble grit at all. Eaten in quantity it can obstruct the gut, and store-bought grit has been implicated as a source of heavy metal exposure.

Calcium sources are a different matter. Cuttlebone, a mineral block or fine shell grit supply calcium, and a laying hen needs a great deal of it. Egg binding in a bird this small is serious and often fatal. Keep a cuttlebone in the cage year round, and make sure it can be reached from a perch.

If you use a powdered calcium or vitamin supplement, put it on moist food. Sprinkled over dry seed it simply ends up in the bottom of the dish with the husks.

Keep these out of reach entirely.

• Avocado.
• Chocolate, and anything containing caffeine, including tea and coffee.
• Salty foods such as chips, pretzels and popcorn.
• Alcohol.
• Anything cooked with oil, butter or spices.
• Apple seeds and stone-fruit pits.

Dairy is not toxic, but birds are lactose intolerant, so keep it to a crumb if at all. Plants sprayed with insecticide or herbicide are a real risk with foraged greens and grass heads, so only pick from ground you know.