Lighting is the part of bird care that often lives in one person's head. You know when the cover comes off, when the room lamp clicks on, and roughly when the current lamp was bought, but a sitter, a family member, or a boarder knows none of it. Writing the routine into the care plan turns a habit into instructions, and the entries below are the complete set worth recording for your bird's own established routine.
The Daily Schedule, Written as Times
Record the day in clock entries rather than descriptions. Note the lights-on time in the morning, or the time the cover is removed if a cage cover marks the start of the day, and the lights-off or cover time in the evening. From those two entries, state the total hours of darkness the bird receives for sleep, since darkness is what a covering sitter needs to protect above all: a bird put to bed late and uncovered early loses sleep even if feeding goes perfectly.
Add how the times are actually kept. If a timer runs the room light or the lamp, write the timer settings into the plan so nobody overrides them by hand and forgets to restore them. Note any seasonal adjustment you already make to the schedule, and where in the home the bird sleeps if the cage moves at night, because a sitter who wheels the cage into a bright hallway has changed the darkness hours without touching a single time entry.
The Lamp Record: Type, Distance, Hours and Date
For each full-spectrum lamp over the cage, record four facts together. The lamp type, written exactly as it appears on the lamp or its packaging, so a replacement matches what the bird already has. The distance from the lamp to the cage or to the main perch, measured rather than estimated, because moving a lamp closer or farther away during a cage rearrange quietly changes what the bird receives. The number of hours the lamp runs each day, which should line up with the lights-on and lights-off times recorded above. And the fitting date, the entry owners often skip.
The fitting date earns its place because a lamp's useful output fades gradually with use while the light still looks bright to your eyes. Without a fitting date in the plan, nobody can tell a fresh lamp from a tired one, and the schedule can look correct on paper while the lamp above the cage is well past its useful life. Record the date each replacement is fitted as a simple entry in the plan, in the same place every time, so the age of the lamp in use is always one glance away.
Keeping the Record True
A care plan only works if it describes the bird's routine as it actually runs today. Update the lighting entries the same week anything changes: a new lamp fitted, a timer reset after a power cut, a cover time shifted for winter evenings. Cross out nothing in a way that loses the old fitting date until the new one is written, because the sequence of fitting dates is the lamp's service history. Keep the plan where the bird is cared for, share a copy with your regular sitter, and check on a quiet weekend that the recorded times match what the timers in the room actually show. Small mismatches between paper and practice are normal to find and quick to fix, and finding them yourself is far better than a sitter finding them mid-stay. A sitter opening the plan inside KinsLe finds fitting dates and darkness hours filed together, since Pet Passport holds the written record in one portable packet.