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Feature Article

    Some of the best things in life come from the smallest beginnings....

by R C McDonald

    It was a one of those rare golden days in late fall, and I was finished for the day earlier than I'd expected. I found myself driving down the road out in the middle of the Fraser Valley, with rows of mountains marching off into the distance on either side of me, their snow-laden peaks glowing with golds, reds, and purples from the afternoon sun. I was idling along, enjoying the glow of the afternoon sun and going nowhere in particular, when a sign caught my eye.

    It belonged to a relatively new pet store, one I had not yet been in yet. I had been meaning to go take a look at what they carried and what they charged for it since they'd first opened, but what with one thing or another, I never seemed to have time to stop by when I was in the area. This time it was different, and whistling under my breath along with the radio, I pulled into the parking lot.

    I was almost at the door, when it suddenly opened, and a short, dark-skinned man burst through it. Halfway out, he stopped, turned, and looked back for a brief moment, then turned back and marched resolutely away, blinking his eyes rapidly. I paused a little, then wandered into the store. The clerk was just adding a cage full of canaries to the area which housed the birds for sale, and I ambled over to take a look.

    "New birds?" I asked the clerk as he came out of the plexi-glassed bird room, and he grinned.

    "Yep! The owner's got family problems, and had to suddenly move back to Italy, so he brought us the whole lot! Canaries, they are, and nice ones, too!"

    "Really!" I murmered and looked a little closer at the birds. The Italian culture has a long love affair with the canary, and some of the most dedicated and knowledgable fanciers I've ever met are Italian.

    The two cages the clerk had indicated did indeed hold some very beautiful canaries, although it was obvious that they had been rather neglected for some time. They were all quite dirty, and the cages were piled high with droppings under the perches - it looked like the paper hadn't been changed for a week or more. There was one small seed cup, one drinker, two perches and about a dozen canaries in each 10 inch by 15 inch cage. The birds looked bedraggled, harrassed, and just generally upset.

    "What are you selling them for, do you know yet?" I asked.

    He replied, "I don't know if that's been settled yet, I will go and check," and headed for the front desk.

    I turned about and began to poke through the bird supplies, keeping a surreptitious eye on the birds in the meantime. Despite their bedraggled state, they all seemed to be fairly healthy, showing no signs of breathing distress, and no dirty vents. All were bright-eyed, responsive, and as active as such a small cage allows.

    One little rose-ivory hen in particular was having a rather hard time of it. She had completely lost her tail, and apparently her composure along with it - every other bird in the cage could and did push her around at will. Wherever she went, somebody didn't want her there, and she was forced to move, and move, and move again.

    I knew that if this kept up she wouldn't last long, and although I make a point to try to never buy any pet from a pet store, I knew that in this case I was going to make an exception - I wanted that sad-looking, stubborn little hen, who would not give up looking for a place for herself.

    I got my way, of course. When I left the store, I had the little rose ivory hen on the seat beside me, in a little box. While I could not see much of her, I could hear her feet tap-tap-tapping about whenever the car paused, and occasionally I saw her beak pushed through the holes in the box. But what really surprised me was when she started 'talking' to me.

    I had been talking to her the whole time, of course, while I drove; nothing in particular, just talk, to let her know she was safe, and not alone. She spent the first ten minutes of the half-hour drive home just exploring her box, then sat with her beak just by one of the air-holes, and began to answer me back with small peeps and cheeps, rather like a canary hen talks to her youngsters.

    This sound appears to be used by most birds only when they are addressing something of great importance to them - I had often heard many birds of all sorts of species 'talk' to their mate or their youngsters in small loving peeps, but it was very rare for a bird to address me in such tones! I was surprised, and very flattered, too.

    We 'talked' back and forth to each other for the entire drive home, and by the time I pulled into the driveway, I felt that I had a new friend. We went in by the back way, and I quickly set her up in her new home in my 'quarantine' area, at the other end of my home from my bird room.

    She had already acquired a name - I had been calling her 'Ivy' for most of the drive home. She seemed to like it, and had answered my first use of it with a short burst of song. When I had repeated it, asking her, "Is your name Ivy?", she again gave me a sweet (if short) trill. 'Ivy' she was from then til the day she died, and never once did she fail to respond when called by her name.

    She seemed very pleased with her new quarters, a roomy affair compared with what I had seen her in at the pet store, 15 by 18 by 30 inches long. But what really caught her attention was the bath.

    She didn't notice it at first, in her excited hopping about the cage, exploring the seed cup and the toys, the perches and the swing... but when she did, she stopped and stared. The expression on her face was unmistakeable - her whole body declared her thoughts.

    Was that really a bathtub?? Could she, finally, get clean?? After a long moment of staring, she tentatively moved over to the tub, stood on the edge, and then bent and took a sip. Yes, it was water, and not too deep, either!

    Joyously, she leaped in and started splashing with abandon and delight. A few minutes later, bedraggled, happy, and thoroughly soaked, she climbed out of the tub, and began to preen.

    She preened her soggy feathers for perhaps a minute or so - then suddenly stopped and lifted her head to stare at the tub. Again, it was clear to me what she was thinking. It had been so long since she'd had a good bath - what if the tub went away again, and it was that long again before she saw another one?

    After a moment or so of staring, she left off preening, and hopped back into the tub to splash and soak.

    All in all, that little hen had 15 - yes, I counted - baths that first afternoon. I finally removed the tubbie in the late afternoon, afraid that her feathers would still be wet when the time came for lights-out.

    Little did I know it then, but Ivy was to become one of the best canary teachers I have ever had. Her tail regrew speedily, and she lived with me for a little over seven and a half years. During that time she raised an average of twelve babies in two clutches a year for the first five years - and invariably tried to sneak in a third, too.

    The rest of her time she spent teaching every other being in her environment our manners.

    This meant that the entire household, which at that point included thirty or more other canaries, a pair of blue waxbills, several society finches, two pairs of gouldian finches, two humans, an elderly cat, three Amazon parrots, a sun conure, two 'tiels, and five grass parakeets, would just have to change our ways, because Ivy required it.

    It's not that she was pushy about it, not at all! It was exactly the reverse, in fact. Ivy was so joyously happy when she got the least little part of what she wanted, that we all enjoyed making her happy, and willingly gave her what she wanted whenever we could.

    Especially so, because we couldn't stand it when Ivy looked sad. Never before or since have I seen a canary hen stop two males from squabbling, simply by calling softly and looking sad - but Ivy could and did, many a time.

    Her sixth year I did not plan to breed her, but Ivy had other plans. At her insistence, I allowed her to share quarters with the mate she chose, and build a nest.

    Age usually decreases a canary hen's ferility, and sometimes even the ability to lay an egg at all, and I didn't expect much, as six years is very old for a breeding hen, and I did not want to stress my old friend. The stress not nesting was causing her was the only reason I allowed her a nest at all, in fact!

    To my surprise, she laid her usual full complement of six eggs, but this time only four hatched. Four is an average clutch size for many canary hens, but Ivy had always laid six eggs per nest, and had always achieved 100% fertility. For her, this was decreased fertility.

    I managed to see that she raised only those four babies that year, with the help of her mate, who was a very good parent. She had a rough moult that year, but came out of it looking her usual beautiful rosey self, and made it clear as we approached spring that she expected again to be allowed a nest.

    This was her seventh year with me, and I was amazed at her persisence. This was the equivalent in human terms to a sixty-five or seventy year old woman wanting to have a baby... surely Ivy was too old for this!

    But she had always loved youngsters. I had often ended out the breeding season with Ivy in the flight cage with the weanling youngsters, because she was such a good 'nursemaid' - if any youngsters were slow to wean fully, she would see to it that they would get fed when they needed it. She was very good at being encouraging, and at showing them how to eat on their own, too.

    So once again I allowed her to build a nest.

    For a long time, there was no eggs, and I wondered if she had gotten too old to be able to lay. She began to look sad, and I surreptitiously added fake eggs to her nest, one a day over several days.

    Then the miracle happened. Ivy laid an egg! One last, perfect, beautiful egg. She nursed it carefully through its incubation period, and to my utter amazement, hatched out one final youngster.

    She allowed her mate to do most of the feeding, and, unusual for her, did not participate much in weaning him, although she did help teach him how to eat for himself. She was still spending a lot of her time in the nest, so instead of removing it, I simply replaced it with a clean one.

    A few days later I saw her watching her latest youngster eating on his own, crying a little to himself about how hungry he was in between each bite, as some youngsters will do. It was dusk, and already many of the other canaries were on their roosts for the night.

    She had a look of utter satisfaction on that beaky little face as she gazed at her youngster, healthy, sassy, fully feathered, and eating on his own, and while I watched, she heaved a huge sigh and climbed into her nest.

    I found her the next morning, stone cold, with her head laying on the edge of the nest, looking as happy as I had ever seen her.

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