I own a new umbrella cockatoo and have questions

[pennsull]

I bought my cockatoo in May, and he is very healthy., but this bird will not eat I still hand feed him formula. any suggestions on how to ween him, remind you he is 7 months and doesn't eat NOTHING (nuts pellets) Nothing, he will break nuts open but will eat them.

 

[JaeG]

It looks like Umbrella cockatoos can take a year to wean so your baby is doing just what a baby cockatoo should.

After a feed of hand rearing formula make sure you are offering a wide variety of soft/easy to eat foods such as sprouts, chopped up fruits and vegetables, scrambled eggs etc. Use your fingers like a bird beak to pick up the food and play with it. Just keep doing that until he is copying you. He will start by playing with the food and eventually shift to realising that it is food to eat.

If you have any other birds it would be good for him to see them eating as he will begin to copy them. He would naturally copy what his parents do so you need to imitate this in the absence of other birds he can copy.

You cannot force a bird to wean and doing so causes them to be insecure. Although I have no experience with larger birds I have hand raised many cockatiels and some wean very fast, others take forever. I've have observed this with parent raised babies also, even within the same clutch, so it is very natural and each bird is an individual.

 

[Rosa moschata]

I bought my cockatoo in May, and he is very healthy., but this bird will not eat I still hand feed him formula. any suggestions on how to ween him, remind you he is 7 months and doesn't eat NOTHING (nuts pellets) Nothing, he will break nuts open but will eat them.

You say you bought your cockatoo in May, and in December it was 7 months old, and you're still hand-feeding it. The math suggests your cockatoo hatched in May -- are you saying you bought a day-old baby? This post looks fake. A new parrot owner who doesn't realize when a cockatoo normally weans doesn't seem to be likely to be sold a newly-hatched baby to rear from day-one.