Share Your Canary Passion
by Sebastian Vallelunga

I have been a bird person for as long as I can remember. In fact, some of my earliest memories are of an enormous white rooster named “Choochy” and his wives and children. Choochy was a very good husband and father to his little flock. He tenderly made sure that his loved ones got any morsel of food he unearthed in the undergrowth before he himself ate, and he was valiant in their defense when any neighborhood cats were snooping around the weedgrown chicken yard. I suppose that I could honestly say that most of what I know about life, I learned from watching Choochy and the many other birds I have been lucky enough to observe since. I have come to waterslagers somewhat late, I guess, but I have come with a desire to pay them the homage they deserve as members of quite an old and honorable race of beings. Some of what I am about to write, I write knowing you have read before, in one form or another. Other things may be new to you. It doesn’t matter. Some things need to be returned to over and over lest we forget the sense of wonder and resulting passion they can rekindle. What most of us think of as true songbirds, the oscines, broke away from their nearest relatives before the end of the Tertiary period 24 million years ago. They did this in a dramatic way that should be the object of our contemplation as song canary breeders: they took the simple bird voice box and transformed it into the master musical instrument in nature, one far more subtle and delicate than any produced by human hands. This oscine syrinx has no fewer than three pairs of muscles to control the voice (Feduccia 169). These muscle pairs allow the songbirds to stretch their voices, so to speak, in some truly amazing ways. Anyone who has heard the echo effects produced in the songs of many species of birds can well appreciate the difference this must have made to the sound of life all those years ago. It must have made the same kind of dramatic impact on the world’s ears that the appearance of the very first colorful feather did on the world’s eyes. The custom of keeping songbirds and ornamental birds in captivity goes back at least as far as the ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese cultures. Most or all of the cage birds kept by these cultures seem to have been trapped wild specimens, but the canary would make a fine symbolic stand-in for them, and in some ways serves as the logical culmination of the ancient art of cage bird keeping. And, although the ancestors of our own canaries have been in captivity only since the Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands in the late 1400’s, these creatures merit placement among domestic animals that have a much longer history with us, like dogs and cats and even roosters, because they have become a part of human myth in their own small way. A myth is a story which is intended to convey some deeper human meaning, truth, or reality than mere facts can convey. Myths, whether they are based on actual historical events or not, are meaningful, true, and real in a way that everyday ways of knowing fall short of. Although its appearance didn’t immediately draw the attention of the Spanish conquistadors and sailors, the canary’s song certainly did. It was for this quality alone that the first of these birds were exported back to Spain, and the first part of the canary myth involves the breeding of the little birds in captivity once they got there. The story goes that the Spaniards discovered the secrets of breeding the birds after long years of trial and error, and jealously guarded these secrets, thereby maintaining a monopoly on the supply of the songsters to the courts of Europe. Because only the males sang, they alone were in demand, and all the females could be kept in Spain for breeding, ensuring that the monopoly would continue indefinitely. It was said that the Spanish monasteries and friaries, where the religious had mastered the art of canary breeding, grew quite rich. Soon, the Gregorian chant of every major religious house in Spain was accompanied by the songs of the breeding birds. At that time, according to the myth, it became fashionable for a wealthy lover to present a singing canary in a bejeweled golden cage to the object of his affection, but the magnificent cage was a mere trifling accessory when compared to the monetary value of the bird within! Well beyond the reign of Elizabeth I of England, who was said to have received many such gifts, this continued to be a common practice in the royal courts of Europe. According to the second part of the canary myth, a chance occurrence ended the Spanish monopoly (Bielfeld 15ff).

As it was returning to Spain from the Canary Islands, a Spanish treasure ship was forced off course by a terrible storm. When the storm was over, the sailors found themselves on the Italian island of Elba; the consignment of birds aboard ship escaped or was released out of pity by the sailors and soon populated the little island. The Italians, as keen to make a buck as the Spaniards, soon heard of this event and began first trapping and later breeding the birds. Shortly thereafter, breeding began in Germany as well, and between these three sources enough birds were eventually raised for prices to drop (Galloway 5). In 1709 and 1713 Hervieux, the superintendent of aviaries and poultry yards for the Duchess De Berry, identified 29 varieties of canary under his care in his Treatise on the Serins of the Canary Islands. Elaborate explanations and descriptions that amount to a sort of mythical “wish list” have grown up around this simple naming of the colors of the common canary available at that time. There are those who still strongly hold that every subsequent breed of canary can be identified from, or at least have its origins traced back to, this holy grail of a list. In this way, everyone’s favorite breed gets to be 300 years old, and that’s a long way back in canary culture (Galloway 10ff). From this point the line of canary myth can be followed to Germany were it takes on even larger dimensions as a Teutonic tragic sense is added to it. Here, out of the adversity of the miner’s life of darkness and damp comes a breed of song canaries which are called edelroller or “noble roller” in Germany, in an effort to show the importance of this breed in the German mind. Here is, according to German roller breeders, a canary’s canary, one that has perfected the hollow rolling depths that a canary’s voice is capable of. There is even an operetta called Der Vogelhandler about the young Tyrolese and Harzer men who tramp off on romantic adventures to far flung regions with 200 small cages strapped to their backs, their home villages depending for survival on the extra income to be brought in by the sale of the rollers. As part of our own waterslager’s breed myth, a travelogue which mentions canaries that have “watery”songs around the city of Mechelen, between Brussels and Antwerp, is supposed to have been written just a year after Hervieux’s 1713 work. This would mean that the waterslager’s origin approaches that magic 300 year mark as well. I think the real point behind all of these myths is to express the human fascination with these little birds, to show the high value that has been placed on them, beyond gold and jewels, by those who appreciate their lively behavior, trim looks, and varied song. There is a tug at the heartstring that ties us to all of the living things around us when we hear these creatures express themselves in song, a tug that brings out the romantic in all of us. With the Italian bird trappers we wish to profit by contact with these birds, and with the German miners we wish to raise ourselves from the darkness of a life without birdsong. In short, the telling and retelling of these myths help us to express our passion about these little birds and their songs. I am a novice breeder. There is so much to learn, so much that experienced breeders can teach. But, it isn’t just the facts that novices need the established breeders to share, it is the infectious passion for the breed that they need to have shared with them the most. It isn’t simply the egg food recipes, the number of light hours to dark hours in the breeding room, or the right age to place a young singer in a show cage for the first time that is most important. It is the sharing of the excitement of breeding the best birds possible, and the meeting of the challenges that means, that is most needed. It is the myth, the passion, the truth beyond the facts that new breeders really need to experience most. I have seen the kind of passion I’m talking about shared with a generosity of spirit that is remarkable by so many experienced and successful breeders, people I have personally met in both the WWC and the AWS. And, what is even more remarkable, there are so many people from around the country and around the world, people I have never seen, who reach out with both information and passion to the novice by means of the internet. Sometimes the passion is on the surface, while at other times it is hidden in the passing on of the egg food recipe, but it is there, and it’s a beautiful thing!

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Bielfeld, Horst. Canaries and Related Birds. Trans. Christa Ahrens. Neptune City, New Jersey: T. F. H., 1983.
If you are looking for some very good information on canary culture, this is a fine reference.
Feduccia, Alan. The Age of Birds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1980.
If you are interested in the structure and evolution of all types of birds, Feduccia has written extensively about these.Galloway, Rudolf. “History of the Canary.” n. d.
http://www.members.madasafish.com/~grahamwhite/download/history.html (25 Nov 2002).
This article is an extract from a book published in London, 1909, and recounts some very interesting early information on canaries as well as a number of origin and other myths.