Birds as food

With quite a lot of snakes in the hobby that are bird feeders in nature, I wonder why so few people feed properly sized birds to such species instead, as of feeding mice, which in long term are likely to be detrimental to snakes health.

I'm thinking of starting raising quails to offer them frozen as food, the same way as mice are. Although the newly hatched chicks are about the size of a hopper mouse, so feeding very small snakes would still require pinkies, from that size on it wouldn't be a problem to supply different sized birds. As nutrition goes, birds contain far less fat than mice or rats, so such a diet would be much better for most of the arboreal species, which are prone to simply getting fat Smile

I also noticed that it takes less time for the snake to digest the meal, judging from H. viridiflavus that I stared to feed quails recently. It took less then 48 hours to turn two 10-day-old birds to crap, as around 4 day for mice of the same weight. Don't think it's the same thing for other species, but it's interesting nonetheless.

What do others think on this? I will be glad on any feedback on this topic, as opinions from experienced people matters greatly.

Sincere regards, Tomaz

Most of my snakes love chicken necks and other chicken parts. So it could be an alternative to mice.

Do find that your snake then eats less because of the bird diet?

As far as I noticed, the snake doesn't eat less, perhaps even more than before, and with greater feeding response.

I feed most of collection on quails.
Particularly my monitors and larger elapids.

very interesting, because I have a pair of Bothriechis schlegelii and waiting to get more arboreals and I want to get as natural as I can but staying on the healthy side because capturing small birds and frogs from the wild will bring parasites and other diseases to the snakes. so I use all frozen.
what do you think about the use of f/t frogs and lizards??

and do you have any more recommendations or suggestions about the use of quails or other birds?? like with out feathers??
regards

I've used frogs, lizards particularly common geckos, to either scent live pinkies via the slime of the frogs, or by making a "paste" out of the lizards) for Tree Snakes (Dendrelaphis punctulata), Keelbacks (Tropidonophis mairii), Marsh Snakes (Hemiaspis signata) and any of the Demansia Species.

I'm also just starting to use this technique on larger elapids such as pseudechis (australis, porphyriacus and guttatus). But instead of scenting pinkies, I use quail. Some take it, some don't. I think it's just finding the right medium.
Eventually they get bigger, less fussy (hopefully) and take anything that's but infront of them.

I use frozen toads and frogs for my Night adder(Causus rhombeatus). The external and internal parasites will die if they get put in the freezer. I usually just feed them these and then once a month scent a mouse with the slime of the frog and give that to it, as too many mice will have too much fat content.

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