Experiences with swift patients in recent years have led to alarming new findings. Feeding errors and their fatal consequences are at the top of the list. While insect-eating songbirds (e.g., swallows, redstarts, robins, warblers, flycatchers, wrens...) perish very quickly when fed incorrectly, a malnourished swift typically reacts with delayed but no less serious damage. In swifts, wrong food seems to primarily cause liver damage and secondarily the widely observed feather defects. However, defective flight feathers are a death sentence for a permanent flier. Even short-term, few-day incorrect feeding causes most young swifts to react with flight feather loss or damage to the feather quill and vane. Diarrhea, severe digestive disorders, and skeletal deformations are also very common.
Fatally, many foods that have since proven to be extremely harmful have been common for decades in feeding young wild bird foundlings and are still recommended by many experts. This is all the worse because finders usually turn for advice to people they must consider competent regarding animals in general and birds in particular. It is to be hoped that many "traditional errors" will soon give way to species-appropriate, nature-oriented nutrition for bird foundlings. Only in this way can the different nutritional requirements of bird patients of the most diverse species, for whose variety there is no "universal recipe", be approximately met.
So which foods should you avoid, and what damage do they cause?
Mealworms
"Mealworms", the falsely named larvae of the mealworm beetle (Tenebrio molitor), available in any pet shop, are still often recommended for feeding insect-eating birds. However, urgent warning must be given against feeding these worms in larger numbers and long-term (longer than 2-3 days). Their chitin shell appears to contain substances that cause severe liver and kidney intoxication over time.
Maggots
Fly maggots, available in fishing shops under the name "Pinkies", are completely unsuitable as food for insect-eating birds. Due to their stable, rubbery coating, they can hardly be broken down by the birds stomach, so they are often excreted undigested. Even if you pierce them before feeding (which is not everyones cup of tea), they must be rejected as food because they have a very high fat content and are far too one-sided as nutrition.
Swifts fed with maggots are usually severely emaciated and develop deficiency symptoms as well as serious defects in the flight feathers. These are often small, barely visible kinks in the feather quill, where the flight feather later breaks at the slightest stress.
Other foods
The above list makes no claim to completeness. Nothing that has not already - and always with devastating consequences! - been fed in good faith to hungry young swifts: Whether budgerigar or canary seed food, rusks, oatmeal, or bread, whether fruit or Vienna sausages, spaghetti, porridge, salami, or fried schnitzel - everything has already happened, and hardly any of the affected "unlucky birds" survived. The list of unsuitable foods could be continued endlessly, and it is simpler to say: Only insect food belongs in a swifts beak!
