Flock Talk eZine Archives, Issue 122

ISSN 1492-8132
Issue 122, © 2005
No reprints without permission

New! Bird & Cage is having their BIG Summer Blow-Out Sale - prices have been slashed, so drop by for big savings on many wrought iron cages!

    The folks at Bird & Cage have made it their goal to provide birdkeepers with a wide selection of good quality cages and cage accessories for great prices. Check out some of their cages that Robirda recommends!

    It's almost time for the annual moult, and that means this is a great time to be sure you have all the accessories you need on hand. See some cage accessories Robirda recommends.

    A recent customer says,"Thank you very much for sending the bird cage so quickly. It exceeded all my expectations, and I am delighted with it."

    For a full selection of cages and cage accessories, visit BirdandCage.com.

Song Fact
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   The May 13th issue of Science magazine included a fascinating article about song research on canaries, performed at the Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Animal Behavior.

   The research team found that young canaries could be played a series of individual tones completely unlike any of their natural songs, and that they would learn to mimic these sounds clearly. This in itself is interesting, for it shows the canary's ability to mimic sounds entirely unlike their own natural song.

   But the real surprise came when the birds achieved maturity and began to come into breeding condition. Without warning, each bird in the test suddenly began to sing the tunes typical of their breed, which they had never before heard!

   The tunes they had previously learned, however, did not vanish entirely, but rather were incorporated by the birds into their song repertoire. Overall, the majority of the songs sung to their mates by these birds remained songs typical of their breed, with here and there a 'grace note' from their learned material added in.

   This indicates that playing your canaries training tapes and music is not necessary for them to learn to sing, but that such tools can indeed enhance and enlarge their natural repertoire.

Links
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For you
& Your Birds,
With Love
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We rely on you to help keep this publication and its associated websites alive. If you find help you need in this ezine or on one of our websites, please consider joining our sponsors.

Read testimonials or find out more about becoming a sponsor. If you're looking for something different, check our home page for links to all our great products!

Our next issue is due June 19th. We hope you and your birds stay safe, well and happy in the meantime, and we look forward to seeing you all then!

Robirda
June 5, 2005
Kelowna, BC, Canada

"Just a short note to tell you how great your ezine is... As a long time bird lover I thank you for your wonderful mag. Keep up the great work!"

"I ordered 'Canary Tales' by Linda Hogan last year...Although I fully recommend buying the book, I find Robirda's book much more complete, easier to read with less difficulty finding information."

Welcome to Robirda's Companion Bird eZine
Welcome to Flock Talk, the ezine for pet bird owners and breeders who CARE!
For breeder or pet bird owners who care.

Table of Contents

Website News: We've updated the Flock Talk Archives for you!.
Canary Song CD: Great canary songs, no distracting background.
Sponsor's Space: BIG Summer Blow-Out Sale on wrought iron cages!
Canary Song Fact:Research finds unusual song-learning facts..
Feature Article: Building an Indoor Aviary for your canaries.
Tips 'N Tricks: Use the moult to improve your canary's songs..
Handy Links: Check here for links to major areas on our site.
Ask Robirda: A recent consultee shares feedback and history..
For You & Your Birds: We couldn't do any of this without you!
Subscribe & Unsubscribe information for Flock Talk.

Website News

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We've updated the Flock Talk Archives to make it easier for you to search for and find the info you want from past issues. From now on, each online issue will include a set of links at the top and bottom of the page that will allow you to go to each year's list of issues. Plus, all pages will now include a search engine in the top right corner. So if you have a question that you just can't find the answer for, try checking through our Archives, there's heaps of great info just waiting to be found!

Check out our improvements starting at www.flocktalk.com

Feature Article

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Most of us love to be able to watch our birds fly and play, but many birdkeepers can't afford to buy a large commercially-built flight cage; they are so expensive! Often it's not too long before the idea occurs to us, to just build our own. Then all we need to know is the best way to go about...

Building an Indoor Aviary

by R C McDonald
www.robirda.com
Copyright © June 2005

    It's a sad fact but true that there are very few books on building aviaries available, when it comes to building for territorial birds such as canaries; most of the good aviary-design books are slanted towards finch or hookbill keepers, who are dealing with species much more sociable than canaries.

    There is one group of birdkeepers, though, that deal with the same territorial issues that plague canary-keepers, and that is those who keep one or more of the many larger and smaller species of grass parakeets or grass parrots native to Australia. Many of these species tend to be highly territorial, so take a look at books from Australia on building aviaries for these kinds of birds, for inspiration.

    Of course if you are lucky enough to live in or be able to visit Australia, try to visit some breeders of these kinds of birds, and you might get a chance to share some ideas on design and useability.

    It's not easy to find basic instructions for building your own cages, flight cages, and aviaries! Good clear pictures, along with basic instructions, are best, but are seldom seen, because a cage-builder needs to be enough of an artist to make proper pictures of how their cages go together.

    There are programs that can produce such designs, of course, but they are horrendously expensive. So unless a canary-keeping artist decides to produce such designs for us one day, in the meantime the best we can do is to write about how we build ours.

    Indoor aviaries are much simpler to produce than outdoor ones, because an outdoor aviary needs to be proof against predators - rats, mice, snakes, toads, hawks/owls, all that sort of thing, as well as providing shelter from weather extremes.

    Indoor aviaries, on the other hand, can be just big cages. Here's a few basics to keep in mind when building indoor flight cages or aviaries for your canaries.

    If you are going to use a wood frame, keep it OUTside of the wire! This removes a bunch of little ledges from the inside of the cage. If you put the wood frame inside the wire, those little ledges will be heaped with droppings, faster than you'd ever expect.

    Paint your wood frame before putting it together with the wire. Painted wood is MUCH easier to keep clean!

    Use welded wire, not braised, and be sure that it has not been hot-dipped. Hot-dipping produces a softer coating of galvanization than welded wire. It can flake or peel quite easily, especially as it ages. If one of your birds eats even the tiniest piece, it will make him seriously ill, if it doesn't kill him. Welded wire is a little more expensive, but is far safer.

    Once you have your wire, roll it out and leave it in the baking hot sun for a day, then flip it over and leave the other side exposed for another day. Then go over both sides with a wire brush. This will get off any and all loose zinc or other such material that could cause problems for your birds. As an alternative, you can just scrub the wire with wire brush and a water/bleach solution of around 10% bleach - but the sunshine method is easier and I've always found works better, too.

    For finches or canaries, you can paint the wire black once you've scrubbed it. This makes it much easier to keep clean, and the black colour makes it almost seem to disappear to the eye when you're looking at the cage. This in turn makes it much easier to see the birds inside the cage, especially when compared to trying to look through shiny wire, which tends to 'pull' the eye.

    Start with a water-based acrylic paint with a glossy finish. Thin it quite a lot, then use a thick wooly roller to roll it onto the wire (this is easiest if the wire is standing up). You'll coat both sides quickly this way, and as long as the paint is thinned enough the drips will run right out, unlike if you use the paint at a normal thickness, where you'll end up with half-hardened drips all over your wire! If you're in any doubt, thin it some more; in this case, too thin is much better than too thick!

    Allow the paint to dry between coats, then let the whole thing stand around someplace with good air cirulation to finish curing for a couple of weeks. The paint will toughen and harden some more while it cures, producing a fairly tough finish.

    If you put on two or three coats of a well-thinned glossy-finish acrylic paint in this mannter, once it's cured you'll have a nice, tight, easy-to-clean coating on the wire, with a smooth, almost plasticy-type finish that will allow you to just wipe it clean with a damp cloth now and again. It's a fair bit of work, but it sure saves a lot of time and trouble down the road!

    Alternatively, especially if you don't have the time (and assuming you can find a good source) you can use 'shepherd's wire', which already has a plastic coating on it. It isn't quite as easy to clean as painted wire, but the finish is even more durable, and it doesn't take time to prepare.

    Before you start actually building, draw up a basic design, so you can see what you'll be dealing with. Remember too, that you must either build your cage narrow enough to go through a door, or make it possible to easily dissasemble it for moving.

    Keep cage doors low, and never design a door that opens up the entire front of the cage, because the birds will tend to fly up and out when you open the door. Instead, keep the top half or more of the cage front, and put the access door lower down.

    Since we are talking about making an indoor aviary for canaries, it's a good idea to think about adapting the design somewhat. Most indoor aviaries are basically one large cage. When it comes to canaries, that can cause some rather extreme territorial issues to arise. Instead, consider making a series of smaller cages that line up with each other and have access doors between to link each to the other.

    Such little inter-cage access doors are called 'pop-holes', in older bird literature - if you've heard any such references, that's what they meant. In this sort of design, you will arrange things so that you'll have food and water available in each separate area of the aviary, so that if there's any aggression in one area, the picked-on bird can just go off to another area.

    This kind of set-up will allow a larger mixed flock of canaries to share a fairly large area much more peaceably than will occur if you try putting a bunch of canaries into one large flight cage, where there's nowhere for a harrassed bird to retreat to when dominance issues arise.

    You'll still have to provide separate breeding cages during the spring, but for most of the rest of the year, your canaries should be able to live in such an shared indoor aviary quite happily!

    A favourite design of mine, is to build one cage long and low; 5 or 6 feet long, 3 feet tall, 2 or 3 feet wide. I'll put two or three access doors along one long side, and leave a slot below them to slide in homemade tin trays (edges carefully folded and hammered flat so they can't hurt little toes). This is the 'front' of the cage.

    Then I'll build another cage 3 feet by 3 feet by 6 feet tall. It will have only one access door, in the middle lower half; if I need to reach the higher areas of the cage I can just crawl right in. Again, the slot for the trays is on the same side as the door, this makes the front of the cage.

    Then I'll put the two cages back to back in the middle of the room, so I can easily access the doors and trays for both cages - and then I'll cut a small 4 - 6 inch 'door' into the wire of the back of each cage, so that the two 'doors' created line up to make a 'pop-hole' into the other cage.

    Each pop-hole 'door' has another piece of wire slightly larger than it, wired over it on the inside of the cage. This way the cover can be dropped down to shut the pophole, or lifted up to be open, from inside either cage.

    Most of the time I'll just use a clothes-pin to peg the flaps up and keep the pop-hole open.

    This kind of arrangement gives the birds all sorts of room to fly and play, and makes for far less arguments than you'd normally see among a mixed flock of canaries. I also like to cut other small 'doors' into the two flight cages, and hang other, smaller cages off the sides of the larger cages; I'll use different types of show or pet-style cages, and will generally put some treat or another into each cage when I hang it up.

    This approach allows the birds to get used to being in all sorts of different styles and kinds of small cages. Even better, they will come to associate being in a small cage with getting a treat; this can come in REALLY handy, especially when you need to catch a bird. Instead of doing it the hard way, just put up a 'treat cage' or two, then watch closely until the bird you want is in the small cage, and close the pop-hole.

    I'm sure you can imagine what a great time-saver this can be, if you ever need to catch a bird in a hurry!

    That's just a few of the better ideas I've learned about building indoor aviaries for my birds. If you keep it simple, building for your birds can be instructive, rewarding, and fun, not to mention highly useful! So jump on in and have some fun with it, and when you're done, do please remember to share what you've learned with the rest of us!

by R C McDonald
www.robirda.com
Copyright © June 2005

"Everyone always asks me why my birds are such beautiful singers and breed such magnificent babies...I tell them that I learned from Robirda! While they give their birds all kinds of 'magical' formulas, I just follow your guide to 'keep it simple.' My birds are now very healthy, and there has been no recurrence of the infection. Thank Goodness!" R.C., Florida

"Even after I made all sorts of changes, my canary still hardly sang. But after I ordered your CD, he sings and sings - I guess he just needed someone to show him how he was supposed to be spending his time! Thanks for such a nice CD."

Song CD
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Our canary song CD offers great quality for one of the lowest prices you can find on the market - and unlike some vendors of canary song CDs, we don't lie about what kind of recordings you'll get, or its intended use. Our CD of Robirda's canaries singing has no distracting background music, and includes 12 16-bit true-stereo tracks, each averaging 4.9 minutes long, for a total of 58 minutes and 48 seconds of pure canary songs.

Listen carefully to our 10 second sample in mp3 format, and you will be able to hear the different positions of each bird! Note too that the CD quality is much better than this sample mp3.

A recent customer told us, "Just a quick message to thank you for your prompt delivery of my CD. Your CD has done wonders for my canary, he hasn't sang for months and now he tries to out sing the CD, very fulfilling for me to watch! Thank you for a great product!"

Learn more about our Canary Song CD!

Tips 'N Tricks
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Play your canaries lots of music during their moult, to help to keep them singing plentiful and varied tunes. While they are growing in new feathers, our canaries are also growing in new brain cells, particularly in the area of their brain that controls song.

Canaries are capable of mimicking a wide variety of sounds, and will often choose to mimic sounds they find attractive. They will pay particular attention to the songs of other birds during this time. Just be careful not to expose them to sounds that you don't like, or you may just find them mimicking those sounds too, omce the moult is over!

Ask Robirda
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   A recent consultee says, "Thanks Robirda, for the informative and friendly reply to my consult.

   "I had a canary as a child and it moulted for a year until it died. Now, 40 years later and with information from your site, I shudder at our ignorance about canaries and their needs. When Dad and I purchased Herbie for Mom we expected a canary that would keep her company with its song. We thought we had a live wind up canary - clean it, feed it, listen to a song.

   "Then I started looking at Herbie differently. Each day brought new insights. Slowly, I learned the difference in her cries and trills. Finally, I became smitten and searched the web for info on canaries and their behavior. Thankfully, I found your site.

   "Not only did I learn how varied and special the species was, not only did I discover techniques for expanding my relations with Herbie, not only did I find a wonderful community of canary lovers, more importantly, I was given the extensive knowledge in nutrition and environment that would keep Herbie in the good health and condition that any pet deserves. Thank goodness for your work and for our bird who never gave up trying to speak and interact with silly slow humans."

   Robirda's customers find her answers to be detailed, reliable, caring and supportive. When you need help with housing, feeding, care or behavioral questions, Robirda can help you learn to understand your birds better. See www.robirda.com/ask.html

"Robirda's website, bird board and e-zine are invaluable tools for any birdlover."

"Thanks for the great information you provide. I have learned so much from reading your work."