Covering birds at night

It sounds like you have a good procedure!

I am trying to be more disciplined about it to control hormones. I generally have five lamps lit in my living room early in the evening. About an hour before the birds' bedtime I turn off three of them and turn the TV down. I give the birds some food in their cage and close them in. A half hour later I turn off another lamp. Then I cover them a half hour later and turn the TV down as low as I can. I try to give them thirteen hours of night (it's hard to get used to this) and don't fuss much about uncovering them in the morning, but I think what you do is good, and I may try it.

Emma was hissing at night when I covered her when she was separated from the budgies. Since I allow her to stay in the budgie cage this has stopped.

I am monitoring what goes on between Emma and the budgies. I know it is unusual, but they all seem to like each other and to get along well. There hasn't been any fighting or bullying between Emma and the budgies. I think the situation is unusual, and I would not encourage others to assume the same will work for them.

Because I have a houseful of family, bedtime here is 10pm. Otherwise the cage would be covered and it would still be light and noisy in the room.

Throughout the evening hours, we interact with our birds. Mistletoe sits somewhere on my upper body. We play some and he cuddles some and he spends some time grinding his beak. The budgies sometimes get force-held, but usually they are just allowed to do what they want. They generally go into their cage as the evening gets later, and start settling down for the night. Mistletoe doesn't want the cage until I get up and physically put him in and close the door right before bedtime. He doesn't like this, and fusses like any little kid at bedtime. Too bad, so sad.

At 10:00 I say goodnight to each bird by name, and then get somebody to assist me in covering the stacked cages. We cover the whole works with a king-sized sheet and then wrap a queen-sized sheet around the cages as far as it will go. This process covers the cages well. I purposely leave about an 8" gap at the bottom of the cage uncovered in front only, and leave a nightlight on for my birds. All other room lights are then turned off, along with TV, music, etc., and my family is asked to respect that the birds (and the baby, for that matter) have been put to bed. Everyone is pretty quiet after that. I stay up too late, but I am quiet, and use headphones if I want to watch Netflix or something on my iPad.

Our birds sleep all night and are stone silent.

i uncover them when i wake up in the morning which is about 7 ish, i then cover them between 6-8, need to fix that lol
if i walk into the room, they all stretch out. for me, this tells me they are ready to be covered, now idk if that is true or not lol
on the weekends in a bit different for uncovering them, they use to wake me up about 730, this has stopped because they are all together now. tweets wakes me up around 830 if im not up by then. lol

hmm, i do not see 20/20 yet, my next app is on the 30th. last app he said everything looked good and it seems he expected to progress like that. it can take up to 6 months, i am barely past 2 months lol
thanks for asking

Thanks everyone for sharing your night time and morning rituals. I find it enteresting.

Heh, I feel like a bad owner because I don't cover Shasta. I tried it and he got a night fright, and he likes to see me when that happens, so he doesn't get covered anymore.

He has all day while I'm at work to sleep anyway.