Patrick; We would love to see pics of your birds. What kind do you have? Tell us a little about them please.

Thank you very much for all the answers!

I was just reading about this a short time ago. It makes me question if we should be adapting them to our Northern Hemisphere sunup/sundown daylight schedules or keep them on what would have been their natural daylight time.

I keep the schedule of the areas sunup and sundown times for my birds handy and I do find I follow that more than our daylight hours.

Grandma, we presently have two blue crown conures, Pedro and Bird-O. There are a few pictures in the "introduce yourself" board of this forum.

For a time when we first moved to Kentucky, we served as a "foster home" to re-home a few unwanted or neglected birds--several eclectus, a hyacinth, a TAG, and a Cockatoo (never again...). I was still at the university then, and some of my fellow faculty and staff would buy exotic birds as trendy novelties or decorative, live furniture--and then quickly lose interest in them and look for a place to dump them. Our schedules and home dynamics changed and we no longer do that.

As my career has brought me to a place where I work out of a home office (and the addition of the SpectraBird venture), I suspect that we will add to our flock in the future.

All birds are photoperiodic, Karen, even equatorial birds that normally have other breeding triggers, and this is used for eliminating off-season breeding in captivity because it's the one we have the most control over.

Of course, one could manipulate conditions so as to reproduce the seasons from the bird's natural habitat and even follow its solar schedule but why would anybody do it? It would require huge infrastructure (it's not only a matter of the length of the day but also the angle of the sun -and that it's very, very hard to reproduce artificially as it changes constantly as the earth rotates around the sun- plus climatological conditions -rainy and dry seasons, diet, etc), it would be incredibly time-consuming and expensive and, actually, all that work and time and money invested would really serve no purpose because birds adapt very well to their 'adopted' country schedule. There is nothing simpler, cheaper or safer than just following the local sun's schedule.