ISSN 1492-8132
Issue 64, © 2003
No reprints without permission

They, and her other customers, have found her answers to be detailed and reliable, caring and supportive. Robirda can help you learn to understand your birds better. Learn more here

This issue's question:

"I had never owned a canary, but a few months ago my daughter and I spotted a sweet little bird just standing in a parking lot, without even the energy to try to fly away when I went to pick her up. She had lost her tail and was VERY dirty. After a couple of baths she looked great. She was thrilled to be alive and as happy as could be, with seemingly no ill effects from her ordeal.

"I am not looking for advice - I just wanted to share our story. We love our Sweety very much and can't imagine not having found her.

"What I would like to know, is if you can help me with her color. I have seen nothing like her. She is pure white with sparrow-colored (brown-grey) wingtips, face and neck markings and a little hat. She is absolutely beautiful. Do you have any idea what her color is called?"

Robirda's answer:

"Hello! Your little hen is known as a 'variegated blue-white' canary. There are two kinds of white canaries; one is recessive, while the other is dominant. The dark markings are produced by melanin in the feathers, and can occur anywhere on the body, but are most often seen on the wings or head; on a white canary, these markings are known as 'blue'.

"Dominant white birds (whether showing any blue markings or not) will have a faint trace of yellow showing in the butts of the wings, and sometimes a little in the wing's flight feathers. You may have to look fairly closely to see this, if it's there!

"A recessive white canary shows no traces of yellow anywhere. If you blow aside the feathers of the vent and look at her belly, the colour of the skin can tell you whether she is dominant or recessive white, too. In a dominant bird, the fat under the skin is yellowish, but this cannot happen with a recessive white canary. This lack of yellow anywhere in the body makes the bird's skin look a rather different colour, almost a light violet.

"Thank you for taking the time to rescue and learn how to care for your little Sweetie, I hope you spend many long happy years together!"

ProBoost SuperMax Protein is designed to mimic the dietary changes that occur in nature and stimulate a breeding response in your birds.

Extra vitamin E and a bio-available sulfur (maxima) help improve fertility. The proteins and maxima, combined with 'Flourish' herbal extracts, ensure excellent chick growth, stimulate the immune system and help establish healthy gut flora. The result is more healthy chicks on the perch.

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Welcome to Robirda's Companion Birds eZine

For breeder or pet bird owners who care.

We rely on our readers and sponsors to help keep this publication and its associated websites in existence. If you find help you need here, please consider joining our sponsors.

For all those who've helped out, thank you for your continued support! Our next issue is due Feb 16th - we hope you enjoy this issue's feature article, and we will look forward to seeing you all then!

Robirda
Feb 2, 2003

If you're willing to change the perch arrangement in the cages you buy, these folks are a great resource. Check out their flight and exercise cages for practically sized, useable cages at a very reasonable cost. (Avoid the round cages, please!)

I particularly like the breeding cage in the '2580' series, which can make a very nice flight cage for canaries or finches - and unlike many of their other cages, actually has the perches set up correctly for small birds, running back-to-front at each side, instead of side-to-side across the top. US residents get an extra bonus here - free shipping!

Feature Article

by R C McDonald
http://www.robirda.com
Copyright © Feb 2003

Pet canaries are territorial little birds, and really not very social at all. Yet time and again I have read that they need company in their cages. In actual fact, pet owners trying, with the best of intentions, to follow this advice quite likely cause the majority of premature deaths in pet canaries.

No explanation has been found for why a reputable author, (many with multiple books to their names), would make such a mistake. In my opinion errors like these throws the reliability of any information from such a source into question.

The fact is, even if you have a really large cage, (big enough to walk into) it is still quite difficult to keep most canaries successfully caged together year round.

While the hens in general are a little more socially inclined, even they like to have their own space to claim, while breeding - and it is not always easy for a new pet owner to understand just what 'coming into breeding condition' means, and how it affects their canaries.

Canaries can often be kept together through the moult and for some months afterward (that is, from late summer through the fall and winter) but as late winter passes and early spring draws near, most males will need to be separated out, to prevent undue agression.

The primary mechanism that triggers their response to the changing seasons is the lighting. The light a canary sees is very important, because canaries have a trait rather rare in pet birds, known as 'photosensitivity'.

This means that a layer of cells in their eyes responds to the lengthening days of spring, and tells their bodies to begin to prepare for their spring breeding season.

This involves actual physical changes. Examination of the birds' vents at this time will reveal that an adult canary in full breeding condition will have a more swollen abdomen than at other times of the year. This is also the only time when such an examination can reveal gender.

The rest of the year there will be no obvious difference, but when in breeding condition, the male's vent will protrude more than the hen's, while the hen's, being somewhat wider, will also protrude a little, but not as much. The difference is subtle and best learned by directly comparing two birds of known gender when in full breeding condition.

Canaries who try to breed earlier or later in the year have been kept under lights that (whether deliberately or by accident) mimic the lengthening days of spring.

If accidental, the lighting can come in sporadic bursts - and this may cause the subsequent death of any chicks that manage to hatch, as nights of irregular length can mean that the hen will not be able to feed the chicks just before dark. Since canary parents don't feed at night, the tiny chicks rely on this evening feeding in order to be able to survive the night.

Sometimes a non-feeding hen may not have access to what she considers appropriate food to feed her chicks, and that can result in chick death too. Other times she may think she is guarding her chicks from a too-aggressive male. The solution is not always obvious, and there may not be much time for experimentation. In fact, raising canary chicks successfully is a lot of work, for both birdie parents and birdie owners!

Until you have actually seen it, it will be hard to believe the quantity of food a growing chick can eat. It is quite astonishing! A canary youngster literally doubles in size every day for the first 10 or 12 days of its life. This rate of growth takes a lot of fuel!

People who are truely determined not to be a breeder generally won't buy a hen - but accidents can and do happen. Many a 'male' canary has suddenly and without warning laid an egg! This does not mean that the bird changed gender, but rather that it was not correctly classed when sold as a male.

Others, thinking their canaries need company, will buy another male, believing that will be less trouble than buying a hen. But expecting two male canaries to share a cage at any time of the year can really lead to trouble!

Imagine two very macho men, strangers to each other. Then imagine them being forced to share a bachelor apartment all day every day. It would be surprising if they didn't fight, yes? That's similar to what happens when we expect two male canaries to peacefully share a pet-sized cage. It could work out - but it almost always does not.

It's a little different when you are dealing with a male and a hen. In a flock of canaries, hens tend to rule the roost, and outside of breeding season the males generally will let them. Their humans will think that they are getting along just fine, but wonder why their male has stopped singing. You see - most males sing very little if at all, when they share their cage with a hen.

Other pairs may argue from the first, then suddenly decide to get along, while yet others may be fine for awhile, then suddenly begin trying to kill each other.

Especially during the spring, one or the other may come into breeding condition first, and this can cause any number of problems with fighting and aggression.

They don't often do this kind of thing while you are watching, either. Generally there is lots more going on in our birds' lives than we realize. Cluing in takes a bit of effort on our part, to learn to understand their basic nature and ways of expression. These are quite different than ours - but quite understandable, too, once you get the hang of it.

Canaries are complex little creatures. Many an experienced hookbill breeder has scratched their heads in puzzlement over canaries, who are so very different in so many ways from other commonly kept kinds of birds.

Most of the species we keep as pets are 'opportunistic' breeders, and are not photosensitive at all. This means they will usually do quite well even under the variable lighting commonly found in a house. But with canaries, such lighting will affect their behaviour drastically.

Most find it easiest to follow a lighting schedule for our canaries. These can stick fairly close to nature, or we may, for convenience or other reasons, want to shift the seasons a little, one way or another. You can easily adapt such a schedule to your needs, just remember that canaries need a steady lighting routine to allow their bodies to maintain a natural seasonal balance.

For an example shedule based on what canaries evolved with, see the chart at robirda.com/sunset.html

Once the canaries are in breeding condition, the eggs will begin to arrive. Each egg laid amounts to as much as 25% of the hen's mass. This means a great deal of her body's resources goes into each egg, and as a result, laying too many eggs can make her seriously ill.

When you own a canary hen, it is not a bad idea to get a liquid calcium supplement to keep on hand, in case of emergency. This can save an egg-bound hen's life. (see our product review in this issue for more)

Incubating her eggs after she has laid them is a natural process, and whether or not you want chicks, she should be allowed to go through it. If instead you remove the eggs, she will lay more eggs, and yet more, trying to get a clutch to incubate.

This is far harder on her than incubating a clutch of eggs! Even if you don't want chicks, you will still need to allow her to spend some time sitting on her eggs, as her body will tell her she needs to do. This will allow her body time to replace the nutrients that went into making the eggs.

Fake eggs don't hatch, and also have the advantage of not drying out and losing weight as infertile eggs will, so replacing the real eggs with these can help to give her a longer time between laying clutches, since she will not abandon fake eggs as fast as she would infertile eggs. This means less over-all egg-laying through the spring season, which is generally healthier for a pet hen.

Egg-binding, that is, difficulty in laying the eggs, has a variety of contributing factors. Most involve a diet lacking in adequate nutrient intake levels, particularly calcium and the vitamins and other minerals needed to properly digest it. Another factor, often disregarded, is the general physical condition the bird is in. This last is directly related to the amount of flying she is allowed throughout the rest of the year.

I have always found that allowing the hen adequate exercise before breeding season comes along to be very important. The time to allow flying is not when a hen is setting on her eggs, but during the winter, while the days are shorter. Given the chance, most hens will fly almost ceaselessly during the latter part of the winter, trying to see that their bodies are properly prepared for the rigours of breeding and laying eggs.

This is why canary hens, even those kept strictly as pets, should have very large cages, or else be allowed to fly about in a bird-safed area on a fairly regular basis. This can be easier to do than you might think! The Flock Talk Archives and our Tips 'N Tricks ebook both have information on safely 'free-flying' a canary.

In actual fact, it is well known that canary people tend to be regarded by other bird owners as being unreasonably attached to our birds. Many of us have other people in our lives who can't understand why anybody would care so much about 'just a couple of silly birds'.

But you see, we know what they don't. We have the disease known as 'Canaryitis'... and, it's completely untweetable!

by R C McDonald
http://www.robirda.com
Copyright © Feb 2003

This is a calcium-rich liquid mineral supplement, that includes all the nutrients needed to supply the greatest and fastest calcium digestibility. No birdie first aid kid should be without some Calciboost - when you are dealing with an eggbound hen, having this on hand can save her life! Gently administer a few drops orally, then place the hen in a warm environment such as a hospital cage. (In a pinch, a heating pad under half of her cage will do.) The combination of the heat and the calcium will quickly allow her to relax and safely pass the egg.

• Do you have or sell a great bird product? Send us a sample, and have it reviewed for Flock Talk readers! We will be reviewing foods, cages and cage accessories, toys, and other bird items we have direct experience with in upcoming issues. To arrange for a review, send your inquiry and a brief description of your product(s) here, to Robirda