Hi, I was wondering what time other people put birds to sleep in the evening, and when they wake them up. How many hours do birds need to sleep at night? I heard 10-11.. is your opinion the same?

Mine go night night at 8-9 PM. They wake up with me at 6 AM for school hours, make some noise and then take a nap at 7 AM to 8 AM. They're up until about 11 AM, another nap, and they go strong until bedtime.

I read up a lot about this when I got Coyote, because I wanted to avoid any of the hormone behavior issues from the very start. Since his cage is in our living room, simply covering it up wasn't going to give him enough dark and quiet time, so I setup a small cage in our back room where I put him every night for bed. I cover his cage with a thick blanket and turn out the light so it's dark and quiet. The budgies go in another back room in their main cage, since it's easy enough to simply carry it and then I turn out the light.

I put them all to bed at 8pm. On the days I'm not working, I uncover Coyote's cage at 9am or so and bring him to his living room cage. Same with the budgies, although they wake up earlier since their cage isn't covered and they get up with the sun (hormone control is not as big an issue for budgies). On the days I work, I get them all up at 7am. So the least amount of dark/quiet hours I will allow him to have his 11, the preferred number of hours (for me) is 12-13.

This works well and even though he's covered with a thick blanket, no issues with air flow or anything like that. The blanket is important because otherwise, the sunshine would wake him up too early and then, obviously, the hormone issues would start.

If you want to have total control over their daylight hours, you must have either a room where you can block all daylight and have a nightlight or use a thick enough cover to block out most light (so that only enough light comes through that they'd get on a moonlit night). Even if you let them get up with the sun, no matter where you live, you'll have times of the year where the day is so long that dark won't happen soon enough in the evening to let them get enough sleep.

Once your current babies are weaned, I truly think your situation would improve greatly if you covered your parents' (and maybe the older babies too) cages with thick blankets and let them all sleep for 14 hours a day until things calm down. It has always sounded like to me that your birds are getting maybe 8 hours of sleep a night and from what I've read, I don't know how you can get the hormone thing under control until that issue is addressed.

My birds go to bed at sunset. In the fall/winter they wake up at sunrise. In spring/summer it's hormone control time - I put the thick cover on the cage and sunrise comes when I want it to, at least 12 hours after sunset and sometimes longer depending on how hormonal they've been acting.

The seasonal variation in day length is more extreme in some places than in others. Where I live the days (and nights) will be about 10-14 hours long at the most depending on the season.

I hope it's not 8 hours, why? From 9pm to 8 am is 11 hours. Never been less than 10 hours in my house.
Thanks for replies! I was wondering not as much from hormone control perspective but rather from the general well being. But everything counts of course.

A deal with the covers is the following here : naturally its getting light in the room with the sunrise because our blinds let light in. I can only use dark thick cover but then it would be completely dark under this cover during night. I can't talk about any night light. The cover would be too thick. Actually I found some good covers that keep them dark after sunrise

My birds are covered with fleeces around 7pm and I take them off at 8am.... I find one bird needs around 14 hours, but the rest are fine with12- 13....

My birds sleep and wake up when nature tells them to.

are they outdoors? Where do you live if its OK to ask? Australia? Hawaii?

Yes, they are outdoors in an aviary. I live in Florida, Miami.

It's possible to have both thick covers and a night light. You don't cover the cage up all the way to the bottom - if you leave some open space at the bottom then some light will go into the cage, but not enough to make it seem like daylight.