

The sleep cage should be put in a room that’s completely dark and quiet, where the bird is not going to be disturbed-such as a spare bedroom, laundry room or even a large walk-in closet. Kim Bear, a parrot behavior consultant in Florida, recommends bird owners provide their parrot with a “sleep cage.” This would be a smaller cage that’s just used for sleeping. You may also need to take some steps to create an environment for your parrot that is more conducive for sleeping. Use Sleep Cages, Bird Cage Covers Or Room-Darkening Blinds To Help Your Bird Sleep Again, you should try to ensure your bird has 10 hours of darkness for sleeping, so if it has already been sleeping for five hours before you got home, make sure you don’t keep it up so late that it is not going to have five hours of darkness left for sleeping. Once the late-night play session is over with, most parrots have no problem going right back to sleep. “Don’t just go in the bird room and startle them awake and expect them to immediately be ready to start playing with you.” “Just turn on the lights, let them wake up slowly so they don’t freak out, and give them a half hour or so to gear up for some play,” Nemetz suggested. It’s okay to break up their sleep, especially if that’s the only way you can have time to play with them.”īut that doesn’t mean you should suddenly wake them up from a deep sleep and immediately put your hands in their cage. “Your parrots do not have to have 10 straight hours of uninterrupted sleep each night. Is it okay to wake him up so that you can interact with him a while? “Yes,” said Larry Nemetz, DVM, an exotics-only veterinarian in southern California. the night before.īut, you may ask, what if you work 2nd shift or you’re taking night classes and you don’t get home until late at night? Your parrot may have been sleeping for several hours before you get home. Keep in mind that your bird should have at least 10 hours of darkness, so if the sun rises at 6:30 a.m., you should not keep your bird up past 8:30 p.m. Unless their bird cages are covered, birds usually awaken when the sun comes up. That means if you leave for work when it’s still dark in the morning, you shouldn’t turn on the lights in the room where you keep your parrots, nor should you disturb them in any way. You can let your birds stay up past sunset, “but then you’re going to need to allow them to sleep later in the morning,” said Julie Burge DVM, a veterinarian and bird breeder in Missouri. Obviously if these people “put their birds to bed” at sunset that doesn’t leave a lot of time for interacting. Reality is a lot of bird owners are away at work all day and don’t get home until 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening, which during much of the year may be after it’s already gotten dark outside or just a short time before sunset. Many pet parrots do well on a sunset-to-sunrise sleeping schedule they get the amount of sleep they need, and they’e awake when nature designed them to be awake and asleep when nature designed them to be sleeping. In the wild, parrots are awake from sunrise to sunset, which amounts to about 12 hours on average, and sleep from sunset to sunrise the other 12 hours in the day. The majority of parrots are tropical or subtropical, meaning they live near the equator where there are 12 hours of darkness every night,” noted Ken Welle, DVM, an avian veterinarian who practices in Illinois. This is a generality some species do better with a little more than 12 hours of sleep, others like less than eight, but most need somewhere around the 10 to 12 hour mark.

Most pet birds do best with between 10 and 12 hours of darkness a night. Let Your Bird Have 10 To 12 Hours Of Sleep Each Night

Avian veterinarians and bird behaviorists generally make the following recommendations: 1. Fortunately, there are steps you can take modify the dark and light cycles for your pet birds to keep them healthy and happy. Obviously nobody wants to turn his or her bird into a sleep-deprived or cabin-fever suffering basket case.
