TOM ROUDYBUSH IS not a bird person, at least not the kind most people expect someone who makes a famous bird food to be. "I'm a misplaced academic," protests the 53-year-old Californian, smiling. "A lot of people think I'm an aviculturist, that I love having all these birds around me. I'm a scientist who happens to work with birds."

Sure enough, Roudybush has not shared his home with a parrot since he gave his yellow-nape Amazon to his ex-wife two years ago. He was fond of Little One, the smallest among five yellow napes he used to own, but didn't feel right leaving her home alone when he traveled.

New products, better packaging
Home for Roudybush is Placerville, Calif., a quaint Gold Rush town of 8,000 nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills. However, he spends most of his time these days on the central California coast, where the company's 15,000-square-foot manufacturing plant each year turns out some 2,000 tons of the honey-colored Roudybush pellets. Every Sunday Roudybush jumps into his 1999 Infiniti and drives the 300 miles to Paso Robles; every Thursday he heads back home again to finish the week at corporate headquarters in nearby Cameron Park.

Roudybush undertook the hectic schedule last August to correct some operations problems he saw brewing. Doing the work of two managers he had to let go, he has cleaned up a small mouse and insect infestation problem and retrained the six-person Paso Robles staff to improve work flow. "I have good people; they were just a little disorganized," he says.

Now, with the finetuning almost complete, Roudybush is looking forward to ending the long commute--and moving his 16-year-old company into a new phase. Last month, Roudybush launched its first finch food, but "that's just the tip of the iceberg," its sandy-haired founder hints mysteriously.

By this summer, Roudybush will introduce at least two additional new lines, including a diet for parrots with allergies. The new feed will make his competitors' "mouths drop open," he promises. "It's going to make them scramble..and say, 'what are we going to do now?'"

The new diets will come in more durable, sexier see-through packaging but will keep the whimsical bird-toe logo sported by the familiar Roudybush milk-carton style containers. Roudybush also plans to consolidate corporate headquarters and manufacturing into one location near Sacramento and lease newer, more efficient machinery to produce the new lines and turn orders around faster.

When asked how sales compare with those of his competitors--Florida-based Harrison's, which touts organic pellets and is sold only through veterinarians' offices, and Illinois-based Lafeber, which augments pellets with the well-known bird treats Nutri-berries and Avi-Cakes--Roudybush demurs. The lanky executive would rather talk about where his real interests lie: the scientific research that made the Roudybush diet possible in the first place.

The reluctant vet
Roudybush spent his early childhood on a farm in Butler, Pa., a steel mill town north of Pittsburgh. He and two of his brothers (a baby brother 15 years Tom's junior would come later, after the family moved to Orange County) grew up with the usual farm-animal assortment of pigs, cows, chickens and ducks. The family also kept dogs, cats, guinea pigs and aquarium fish.

His childhood interest in animals and biology led family and friends to believe young Tom would naturally want to become a veterinarian. He went along with the notion until he entered college at the University of California at Davis at the age of 18.

After a few months at school, Roudybush decided to pursue a bachelor's degree in biochemistry instead. "I realized that being a vet is trying to cope with a problem with much less information than you need to make a clear decision," he says. "Lots of diagnoses are wrong, not because vets aren't good at what they do, but because they never get enough information to make a better diagnosis."

Summer jobs at local animal hospitals cemented his decision when he discovered another downside to animal medicine: handling the business end of cranky clients.

"Those big nasty dogs will bite you!" he exclaims. But an ocelot "all fangs and claws" made the biggest impression. To clean the animal's cage, technicians had to don heavy leather gloves, use a coathanger to pull the cat's leash to within reach, and then swing the ocelot by the neck into a separate holding cage. "We never touched it. One day I was swinging him and the leash broke. Fortunately, he landed in the cage."

Roudybush soon stumbled across a job he liked a lot better: researching poultry and game birds in the university's avian sciences department. Not only was lab work a less dangerous way to support his studies, the insular, methodical life of a researcher appealed to Roudybush, who jokes he has a "totally weird" personality that's a cross between a loner and a hard-driven entrepreneur.

Happy in his newfound niche, Roudybush set his sights on a master's degree in avian sciences and took long, happy breaks from school to study waterfowl in the Farallon Islands and Alaska.

Meet the parrots
In 1979, an even more tempting opportunity fell in Roudybush's lap, one that would set him on course to shed his lab coat and enter the world of business. The avian sciences department was launching a new program called the Psittacine Research Project. Would Roudybush be interested in signing on as a postgraduate researcher for a Ph.D. in nutrition?

Roudybush jumped at the chance. Not only would this project attempt something never done before--determine the complete nutritional requirements of parrots--it promised to be a kinder, gentler program than poultry testing.

"With poultry, if we wanted to determine how nutrition affected a bird's liver, we had to grow 400 chicks on a certain diet," he remembers. "At a certain age, we took their livers. Needless to say, they did not survive that. I don't like to cause pain. I figured that with more expensive, scarcer psittacines, there would be more impetus to design experiments to preserve lives, not waste them."

For its first research flock, the university chose normal gray cockatiels. The small parrots were relatively inexpensive, sexually dimorphic, good breeders, and large enough to withstand frequent blood withdrawals.

Roudybush's initial experience with the cockatiels, his first encounter with any type of parrot, was not encouraging.

Roudybush with a satisfied client. His first parrot encounter resulted in bloodshed.

Assigned the job of collecting the first batch of birds, Roudybush drove down to a post-quarantine holding facility in Newhall, a suburb north of Los Angeles. There, he hand selected 23 females and 23 males out of a flock of several hundred wild cockatiels, and quickly learned, "They bite. When I was done, my fingers were a bloody mess."

Happily, the bite-shy Roudybush soon discovered that, unlike ocelots, he could tame cockatiels in 15 minutes. "I just held them against my chest and stroked them."

Turning salesman
By 1981, the university's cockatiels had been successfully converted over to a pelleted diet developed in the lab and seemed to be thriving. The new food consisted primarily of corn, wheat, peanut meal and soybean meal. Roudybush hit the bird-club circuit to extol the benefits of the new diet.

"The response was, 'That's all fine and dandy, but nobody's making this stuff, so what's it good for'?"

In 1985, Roudybush began selling small batches of the pellets on the side to satisfy the growing demand. His first manufacturing "plant," 800 square feet of rented warehouse space in nearby Woodland, Calif., consisted of a small cement mixer to combine the ingredients, a screen pulled off one of the windows to process them, and a shiny new trash can to catch the pellets.

Since then, sales have increased steadily by 20 percent annually, not phenomenal growth but a comfortable pace for Roudybush, who did not leave his beloved research position at UC-Davis until 1990. After tripling manufacturing space in Woodland, he moved the company to Templeton, then in the mid-90s to the current facility in Paso Robles.

Today, Roudybush offers 16 formulated diets, the widest variety available, including eight "special-care" diets available only through vets for birds suffering from chlamydiosis, liver disease, kidney disease and obesity.

The benefits of science
When not overseeing his company, Roudybush teaches animal science classes at UC-Davis and travels extensively speaking to veterinary groups and bird clubs.

He stepped up appearances at veterinary meetings several years ago when he realized that the general public was hearing about his research breakthroughs at bird club talks before their veterinarians were.

"I was talking about lysine deficiency at one club and a woman challenged me, asking me how it could be so when her vet didn't even know about it. I said, 'Of course your vet doesn't know; we just published it; you're the first to know.' I don't think she was making the connection that we do the work that the vets use."

While Roudybush shies away from direct comparisons with competitors, he is bullish on the advantages he says scientific research gives his pellets over those sold by Harrison's and Lafeber, and is happy to explain why he chooses certain ingredients.

Scientifically conducted clinical trials, as opposed to simple feeding experiments other pellet companies perform, help take the guesswork out of designing a good all-in-one parrot diet, he says.

Although Lafeber began selling pellets 10 years before Roudybush did, his competitors "don't measure parameters or record data and they are not peer reviewed to ensure the experiment is well designed and well documented." Roudybush is the only bird food based on research published in the Journal of Nutrition and other respected scientific journals, he notes.

Organic versus practical
An example of research trumping guesswork is the question of how much of the essential amino acid lysine parrot diets should contain. Before the UC-Davis research, achromatosis in parrots--lack of pigmentation in feathers--was mistakenly attributed to a lysine deficiency, says Roudybush.

Other tweaks Roudybush has made to his pellets over the years include lowering the amounts of vitamin A and D. That change was made to guard against fatal overdoses when well-meaning bird owners add off-the-shelf vitamins, a big no-no with most pelleted diets.

More vitamin A research is needed, he says. "There are so many cases of either deficiency or toxicity. If we know what's required, we can supply that, or beta carotene to avoid the [whole issue of] toxicity."

Organic labels don't necessarily mean better quality, says Roudybush. He notes that Harrison's, modeled after an all-natural diet used by English aviculturist John Stoodley, is expensive and suffers from short shelf life.

"Socrates was killed by organic hemlock," he reminds, smiling. "You eliminate some bad things by adhering to organics, but you also eliminate some things that are beneficial. I believe I can produce food with some nonorganic practices that are better quality than so-called organic foods."

Better shelf life
Case in point: By adding an antioxident to his feed, Roudybush increases the shelf life of an opened package of pellets to over a year, compared with only six weeks for Harrison's.

Roudybush says he has had to combat untrue rumors about the antioxidant he uses, ethoxyquin, ever since a woman attributed its presence in dog food to her pets' health problems and the misinformation spread on the Internet. According to studies conducted by other scientists, ethoxyquin used at low levels is safe, says Roudybush.

Roudybush is more concerned about future gene alterations planned for crops such as soybeans, which could have harmful effects on the environment and, eventually, on both people and animal food.

He echoes a growing concern that science may be introducing anomalies by using gene alterations to compress into a few weeks natural processes that ordinarily require months or years. Unwanted results could include entire species of insects being wiped out or allergic reactions to food.

"Agriculture has taken the position that there's no difference between changing a plant by plant breeding and changing a plant by chemically manipulating the genome. That's like saying there's no difference between killing a fly in your living room by swatting it and using a thermonuclear device. If it's my living room, I want the fly swatter."

Low-cal treats okay
Roudybush avoids dyes, a staple of the colorful Lafeber food, because all available research on their effects is based on rodents, not birds. Anecdotal evidence suggests dyes cause behavioral problems in parrots, he says.

However, like Lafeber, Roudybush steams and compresses his diet into pellets rather than extrude--or grind--it. Extruded diets such as Harrison's don't work birds' gizzards enough, eventually weakening them to the point they have trouble digesting seed, he says.

Like most pelleted food makers, Roudybush advertises his diet as nutritionally complete for parrots, with no supplements required. However, his admonition to feed no more than 5 percent of non-pelleted foods refers to calories, not sheer amount, he says.

As long as pet owners supplement with vegetables and fruit and not high-calorie extras like sunflower seeds, they can still offer plenty of treats without throwing nutrition out of balance. For instance, you can give a bird almost as much broccoli as pellets because it contains only 12 percent of pellets' calories, Roudybush points out.

The cost of progress
Roudybush has been criticized for using animal testing to develop his bird food. His hopes that the Psittacine Research Project could avoid lethal experiments did not quite pan out as expected, he admits.

"Actually, we got really good at breeding cockatiels" for experiments, he says, including about 1,000 he hand raised himself.

Not all of the experiments resulted in suffering; many studied breeding and weaning. As for those that did, Roudybush is unapologetic. "A lot of people will say there is nothing worth enough to cause an animal misery. That is their point of view."

"My point of view is that I alleviate far more suffering and pain than I cause. And the beneficial information will be available for a very long time, unless all the libraries burn down. For me, doing research has a cost, not only money, time and effort, but also the effect on the critter. You have to travel the road before you can begin to apply the knowledge."

Formulated diets have helped end the health problems caused by all-seed diets, says Roudybush, who asserts only about 5 percent of diseases veterinarians diagnose today are due to nutritional deficiencies. That advance in turn has enabled this country to raise its own supply of pet parrots rather than rely on the cruel import industry.

Possible feather-picking cure
Roudybush is eager to see how successful his new allergy diet will be for parrots who pluck out their own feathers, a huge problem for some owners of larger species such as cockatoos.

"I'm sure that feather picking is more than one thing. But if 30 or 40 percent of birds pick their feathers because of food allergies, and if we can eliminate those items, then that's a pretty good game."

Second to developing new feeds, Roudybush most enjoys hearing from satisfied customers, especially those he helps by sharing his knowledge.

"I get to hear people say, 'You saved my bird's life because of something you taught me.'"

ParrotChronicles.com. Published 2001.

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