by Pajarita » Tue Oct 28, 2014 10:42 am
Well, for one thing, you can't duplicate the change in solar spectrum with artificial lights so keeping them at their geographical point of origin artificially simply does not work. For another, if we were to do the same schedule they do in the wild, we would be doing the 12L/12D that tropical birds do and which we used to do years ago but, problem is, birds get hormonal on it because we can't control their diet and it's always good weather inside a human home so the whole purpose of keeping them to photoperiodism would be nullified. And, last but not least, why bother? There are not only studies that tell us that all birds revert to photoperiodism regardless of where they come from but I can tell you, from my personal experience, that it works like a charm! They do keep to what would be their 'natural' seasons, though - and different species would breed at different points during the warm weather -grays and toos would do it very early in the spring and again at the end of the summer, beginning of fall; budgies would go at it all spring and summer long; conures kind of fall in the middle, etc. Obviously, the solar schedule needs to provide a minimum number of hours of sleep during the summer so, when you live all the way up North or all the way down South, it doesn't work because you can't keep birds up for six month and then make them sleep for the other six or give them 20 hours of light and 4 of sleep or 20 hours of sleep and 4 of day.
I live in Northern New Jersey and the nights are pretty long during the winter but the only consequence of it is that they lose a bit of weight - something that happens in Nature and which is perfectly natural and even healthy (birds in nature are all seasonal feeders, not like in captivity where they always get the same diet) as there is always less food in terms of quantity and quality during the resting season and the reason why, in tropical and subtropical areas, this IS the 'resting' season and not the 'breeding' season.