ISSN #1492-8132
Issue Number 38
Copyright © 2002
all rights reserved
no reprints without
permission

Either the bird has been on a diet severely deficient in the vitamins and minerals necessary to keep the feathers in good shape, or else the bird is too ill to care for his feathers the way he normally would. Either condition is worrisome.

The first problem can also mean that the bird does not have adequate nutrition available to grow in new feathers through the normal moulting process, thus forcing him to continue to get along with his old, worn-out feathers. Such a condition, if left untreated, most often means a slow and lingering death.

If you've ruled out illness, then diet is the culprit. Take the necessary steps to correct the diet and increase the available dietary vitamins and minerals, and you will notice a dramatic change in the colour and condition of the feathers within just a few short weeks. I have seen this change be so extreme that people who hadn't seen the birds every day thought that I had bought new birds!

The question this issue is;

"How can you tell a guy bird from a girl bird?"

    Robirda's answer;

"Hello! This may sound a little too obvious, but, if it has laid an egg, you will know without doubt that you have a hen. On the other hand, if you have a bird who has fertilzed a hen's eggs, allowing her to produce live young, then you can be certain that he is male.

"Until they are fully adult and come into breeding condition, though, you will be reduced to guessing.

"Generally the better singers are males. The problem with trying to determine the gender of younger birds, is that often many youngsters of both genders will sing 'baby songs'. That means song is not always a reliable indicator, particularly in a young canary, although the odds are tilted in favour of it being a male if it sings quite a lot, and well.

"It's not a certainty though, as many hens sing a little, a few quite a lot, and a very few sing every bit as much and as well as the males! The latter are not all that common, but they are not extreme rarities, either.

"Some people will tell you that you can tell a bird's gender by holding a needle on a string over the bird's vent, and watching which way it swings. This works on the same principle as dowsing, and only works for some people. When I try it, for example, all my birds seem to be hens!

"When they are adult and in full breeding condition, it is possible to tell the gender by picking up the bird and gently blowing away the feathers from around the vent area. When a canary of either gender is in breeding condition, the whole abdomen tends to make a cone-like shape, but the tip of the the male's is more pointed, and the female's is rounder and flatter.

"Each gender has a small circle of tiny 'feeler feathers' around the vent. When the birds are in breeding condition, the male's 'feeler feathers' stand straight up, and may even lean together just a little at the center, while the hen's, while still pointing up, will tend to spread out just a little.

"Remember that this will only work if the bird is in full breeding condition, otherwise they all look the same. Even then it's not all that obvious to the eye unless you have had some experience and know quite well what you are looking at, so at first you should make sure to compare the vents of several birds of known gender when you are sure they are in breeding condition, so as to be able to learn exactly what you are really looking for."

Welcome to Robirda's Companion Birds eZine

For bird people who care.

Hello! Welcome to the 38th issue of Flock Talk - thanks for reading!

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Those of you who will be selling canaries this year will be interested in Robirda's new Basic Canary Care Info-Sheet. Give each customer a copy, and save yourself time and money! For more info, click here.

Any day now we will be making Robirda's new ebook, 'Brats In Feathers, Introducing Canaries' available!

Written especially for the new canary owner, in answer to repeated requests from users of Robirda.com, this ninety-six page ebook combines old favourites from the website, newly updated and rewritten, with all-new material never before published anywhere.

It is liberally sprinkled with top-quality photographs of various kinds and colours of canaries, and will soon be available for download from the website for only $10.00 US.

You will find more information about getting and viewing this new resource, including a list of the chapters and photographs, by clicking here. Keep your eyes peeled, you won't want to miss this one!

This is a fascinating site about research into migratory birds, and their living, feeding, and migration habits.

To put it in their own words, "The general objective of the Bird Migration Research Group at the Department of Animal Ecology, Lund University, is to forward, by research and teaching, the understanding of adaptive values and evolutionary possibilities and limitations in bird migration, flight, orientation and energetics."

If you are at all interested in why and how birds do what they do, you will want to be sure not to miss this site!

Feature Article

It can be difficult to always be sure what gender the canary you are buying actually is, and every year I hear of people who end up owning a canary hen, when they thought they were buying a male. Others may buy a pet canary hen rather than a male because of her appearance, personality, or even price.

Many pet owners, especially those new to canaries, just don't realize that keeping and nurturing a canary hen as a pet can be rather different than keeping a male canary. The fact is, whether you have a male canary with her or not, and whether you plan to breed her or not, as long as she is healthy, sooner or later your canary hen will prove to you that...

by R C McDonald
copyright © Feb, 2002

I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who were shocked to find that their pet hen canary, living all on her own with no male in sight, suddenly turned around and laid an egg. It's a fairly common misconception that as long as there is no male, there will be no eggs.

"You mean they're like a chicken?" is often the next question - frequently delivered in tones of shock.

Well, no. Not exactly. But, a canary hen will lay eggs at the appropriate time of year, if she is healthy enough. Some hens will try to lay eggs even if they is not really healthy enough. Whether these eggs have been fertilized for her or not actually has nothing to do with whether they will be laid, but only with whether they have the potential to hatch.

Generally egg-laying will happen sometime during the spring. If eggs appear before or after that, it is usually due to her having been exposed to artificial lighting before dawn or after sunset. This leads her system to react as if it were spring, by pushing her into breeding condition.

Many pet owners don't really want to raise babies, but don't want to give up their hen, either. Others assume that whether they want to or not, eggs will mean that they have to raise babies.

Neither is necessarily true. So what's a puzzled pet owner to do?

Well, if you just take the egg away, chances are good that she will just keep laying, another, and another, and another, until her body's resources are too low to lay more. By then she will be a very sick little bird.

Each egg a canary hen lays can amounts to the equivalent of as much as 25% of her total physical resources. Yet her body, in breeding season, will try to make her lay an egg a day until she has a clutch to incubate. This is pure instinct for canary hens, a powerful impulse that will not be denied.

So if you simply remove the eggs, you will in effect be forcing her to lay more eggs than she otherwise would. This in turn will use more nutrients, which will be pulled from her muscles and bones in favour of the eggs, unless her diet is sufficiently rich in the necessary minerals and vitamins for producing an egg.

Proper muscle function also requires a mineral supply. These nutrients ensure smooth operation of the muscles throughout the body. So when a hen's body is so lacking in dietary minerals and the vitamins needed to digest them that it is forced to use its own supplies in order to make an egg, the bird's muscles lose much of their smoothness and power.

This can lead to eggbinding, where the hen is unable to pass her egg. If left untreated, this condition can kill within 24 hours; in effect, she must lay the egg or die.

If ever you should happen to find a hen in such a condition, liquid calcium given orally, along with heat, may help her to pass the egg. Far better, though, is to take steps to prevent such an occurance in the first place.

The best thing I have found to do begins well ahead of time, by obtaining a batch of fake canary eggs. Every owner of a canary hen should have at least a few of these inexpensive and indispensable little items on hand for when they are needed. They are cheap and readily available from various suppliers such as Abba Products, who can be found at www.abbaseed.com.

Then, when she shows signs of wanting to nest, you can go ahead and give her the nestpan, and let her lay her eggs. As each egg is laid, remove it, and replace it with a fake egg, until the clutch is complete and she begins to sett.

Real eggs, if infertile, will slowly lose their water content during incubation, and that will make them lighter. This in turn will be noticed by the hen when she is turning them, and can trigger her to thow them out and lay more 'good' eggs.

Fake eggs, of course, cannot lose weight, and so the hen's instincts will tell her that she is incubating fertile eggs. This in turn this usually means that most hens will be content to sett and wait for the eggs to hatch, rather than tossing them out and laying yet more eggs, as they might with infertile eggs.

Let her incubate her fake eggs for at least a couple of weeks or more before you even begin to consider removing her nest. Some hens will want to repeat this nesting cycle right through the spring, until she begins her summer moult, and her body tells her that breeding season is over. She may even abandon the nest willingly herself, at that point.

Many canary hens will try to breed for up to half the year if their environment encourages it. That's why I feel it is quite important to not trigger the start of breeding season too early, as it can be difficult if not downright impossible to get them to stop, once nesting is underway.

The best way I have found to control breeding is to monitor the amount of light she is getting, and be sure she does not see too much artificial light before sunrise or after sunset, particularly during the winter. You will find a chart showing the kind of annual daylengths canaries evolved for at www.robirda.com/sunset.html.

You will often hear that reducing the amount of light a hen is seeing can stop her from wanting to breed, and as far as it goes, this is true. What is too often left unsaid, though, is that the reason this works is that a reduction in the amount of light will usually trigger a moult, and that this is what will bring about the bodily changes that will put a stop, for awhile at least, to her wanting to breed.

You want to be careful using lighting as a means to stop a hen from breeding, though, as if you should happen to increase the lights once her moult is over, she is quite likely to once again try to begin breeding - because to her, lengthening days is a signal that it is spring, and time to begin breeding.

Personally, I prefer to not mess with what nature has worked out so well, and try to follow the pattern established by the birds' genetic heritage. To me, this means using a lighting system throughout the year that is based on the hours of natural daylight they evolved with, as displayed in the above-mentioned chart.

As the chart shows, the shortest day of the year in the Canary Islands is ten and a half hours long. In midsummer, the longest day is fourteen hours. I use these extremes as my guidelines, and follow the pattern of the rest of the chart as best I can.

After the midwinter solstice, I begin to increase the amount of time the birds lights are on by about 15 minutes every couple of weeks, until they are at the maximum of fourteen hours. There they will stay until the summer solstice, when I begin decreasing slowly, until I hit the ten and a half hours. At this point they stop and hold steady again, waiting for midwinter, when the whole cycle begins all over again.

Once you have this routine established, you will be able to keep your pet canary hen's urge to breed satisfied without sacrificing her health. Granted, she won't be much interested in interacting with you while she is on her nest, but never mind that, it won't last forever.

Once her nesting instinct has been satisfied and breeding season is over, she will return to being her normal, active, happy little self, and you will have a wonderful, healthy pet canary hen for the rest of the year.

by R C McDonald
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Copyright © Feb 2002.
All rights reserved.

Dietary sources of vitamin B can be hard to find, yet this essential vitamin is vital to keeping the nervous and digestive systems operating smoothly, as well as being important to the proper functioning of the immune system. But there is an easy way to add high-quality vitamin B and trace minerals to your bird's diet, and chances are he will gobble it up and look for more!

Health food stores are often good sources for nutritious dietary additives. Two of my all-time favourites are rarely if ever seen in other stores, yet are usually easily available in any good health food store. They have been very useful over the years in helping me maintain my birds' - and my own! - health and resistance to disease.

The two products I am speaking of are dried, powdered kelp, a safe, low-salt mineral-rich source of dietary iodine and other trace elements, and edible Brewer's Yeast (the only kind of Brewer's Yeast sold in such stores).

Brewer's yeast is loaded with vitamin B's. My favourite brand is known as 'Engevita', and has a mild, nutty flavor without the bitter after-taste of some. It also has extra B-12 added, which is nice because most brewer's yeasts are low in this essential component of the B vitamin group.

But it's the way you serve these two products that's the real trick. Get (or make) some dry-popped popcorn. How you do it doesn't really matter, just so long as there isn't any oil used in popping it - you can even buy it pre-popped if you like!

Drizzle a little olive oil on the popped kernels, and sprinkle it liberally with equal parts of the powdered kelp, brewer's yeast, and (if you like) some paprika or a little cayenne, and toss til the popcorn is lightly coated.

A warning - don't try eating this yourself, or you won't want to share it with your birds! It's much tastier than you might think, and adds a power-packed dollop of nutrition to any diet. Try this and you will never be satisfied with ordinary popcorn again.

Although you could always just make more...

If you have found help you need in this ezine, please consider joining our sponsors, and help keep Flock Talk and its web home alive and well. Learn how here.

Our next issue is due Febuary 17th - until then, may you and your birds enjoy all the best of everything!

R C McDonald
February 3, 2002
Vancouver, BC, Canada