Around 7pm I was awake by thrashing in the room I share with five tiels. Time I switched the light on I heard the nine in the bird room thrashing around too...
It was super scary but luckily everyone was fine, very quite but no blood or injuries thank God.
This is the worst one ever happened, it wasn't easy to stay calm.
I was bitten by Hamish and Mr Darcy but it's all good now.
I still don't understand how and why it happened,!

Those panicked bites hurt.

Glad everyone is okay.

I'm so happy everyone is ok. Night frights are scary for everyone.

I wonder if birds have bad dreams sometimes. There have been times when I heard a night fright start, and there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. All it takes is one bird to start it, and they all join in.

Of course there have also been times when a night fright started because of an unusual sound or something like that. But other times there's no known explanation for it.

Yes, I often wonder about what their brains do when they are asleep. After all humans are not the only dreamers, cats and dogs dream too. If it's only a mammals' thing, still the brain must do something in birds too, maybe similar to dreams.
I wish they could tell us!


You can say that
When they have a fright when in their cages I wouldn't dare putting my hand inside until I managed to calm them down, but this was different because they were all outside!!!!
I sleep from 11am to about 7pm, and before I go to bed I open all the cages so that they can have a normal day as they are used to.
Usually I leave a small light on but yesterday I forgot, stupid me.
What woke me up, apart from the noise, was them falling on the bed and then taking off again. When I switched the light on it took a while for them to stop flying wildly and bumping on things, so when one fell on the bed I tried to offer my finger so they could hop on and stop panicking. Hamish wasn't impressed lol, my finger still hurts. To be honest I was feeling in a bad dream myself.

The fact that they could have a night fright outside the cages, in complete silence, was something I thought it would never happen, after all they choose their favourite spots, where they feel safe.
The guys in the bird room were scared for a while but soon got back to normal, but the ones in the living room were so shaken they didn't make a noise or fly for hours, poor things.

I wonder if they have night frights in the wild too.

Glad all is ok Barbara....
I don't think my birds have ever had
the night frights...
I always cover each bird with a fleece, lock the cage doors...(I'm afraid if I had to grab the birds in the night, because of fire, or a break in,at least in their cages I could get at them). They are covered for at least 13 hours if possible...

I'm sure they do have night frights in the wild. It's an escape response for when a nocturnal predator tries to catch them, so if they hear any kind of odd noise their first reaction is to fly away. Cockatiels are more prone to doing this than most other parrot species.

Night frights inside the cage are bad but IMO it's even worse when they're not in the cage. They can fly further and build up more speed before they crash into something, and there's more potential for them to end up in an undesirable place or get tangled up in something.

Totally unhelpful post here, but just out of curiosity, I wonder why cockatiels are more prone to night frights than other parrots? And why does my spell check always want to change "cockatiels" to "cockatrices"? I mean, come on spell check... I like mythology as much as the next person but honestly...

Seriously, autocorrect, how the heck do you now know what "cockatiels" are, but know what the heck a cockatrice is?!

The theory I've heard is that it's because cockatiels live in relatively open country where the trees aren't very dense. If they fly off blindly into the night they're less likely to smack into a tree than a rain forest bird would be. So their survival rate is better if they fly, while a bird from a different sort of habitat might be better off to stay put longer until they're sure something is wrong.