Splat-n-Retro's Parrot Pages
There is a lot of debate over how much light, the brand, and type of light, how long the lights are actually doing the good thing that is the reason you wanted to get the lights in the first place. All we can say is do your research! A nice she-human told us about a place online that has lots of information about lighting, the link is at the bottom of this page, use it as ONE of your sources certainly not the ONLY one to base your decision on.
We are by no means experts on the whole lighting issue but from what we were able to derive from the information we found is that one important item to consider is being consistant with when in the day you turn the lights on and for how long you leave them on. Our pet humans turn the lights on every day before work and turn them off every day as soon as they get home. They try to keep that same schedule even on the days when they are not away at work.
Another issue of importance is to be sure and replace the full-spectrum bulb regularly as the part of the spectrum that it emits that is actually of benefit to your birds is the first part of the bulb to not "work", long before the bulb stops working.
Across the board we found that in order for any metobolic benefits to occur, the lights need to be no further away from the parrot than 2 feet. Now in Retro's case (Retro is a Pionus*) Sometimes we don't extend the light down to 2' away because we know that Retro's wild cousins come from the cloud forest and we are surmising that the Pionus species don't require as much light as say our Blue-fronted Amazon and the African Grey. These are of course, just our theories.
We purchased our lights online from Avitech Exotic Birds. We found the folks at Avitech were very helpful AND friendly. In the interest of offering ideas on how to provide full-spectrum lighting to your fids we would like to provide these photos of our arrangement.
Factors worked into how we decided to install our lighting:
- A way to move the lights up and down anytime we wanted
- A way to anchor the cord and keep the hanging cord out of any gnawing parrot's way
- cost
- simplicity
 Common plant hanger |
 Common Clothes hook - would prefer a cleat instead |
 Light in the raised position |
 Light in the lowered position |
* For more detailed info about Pionus Parrots check out the Pionus Parrots Research Foundation website