Some years ago I heard John Burroughs lecture in Boston in the rooms of the Procopeia Club on “Observation of Nature.”
He said that we see in life what we look for, and told of Thoreau who had a great faculty for finding arrow-heads. A friend with whom he was walking one day asked him how he found them.
“In this way,” replied Thoreau, stooping down and picking one up.
After I became interested in birds I found them all around me, and even in my small native city discovered that there existed several fine collections of birds, especially of canaries.
I visited these collections and, observing the great variety of canaries, found that it is with them as it is with pigeons. The original stock has been so transformed and improved on that one cannot recognize the little wild ancestral canary of the islands off the coast of Africa, in their diversified descendants.
There are the nervous, high-strung Belgian canaries with the humps on their backs, making them look like tiny yellow camels, the Scotch fancies with their half-circles of bodies, the insignificant looking Germans with their exquisite song, the fluffy French, the strangely marked hybrids, and the large, handsome English birds, often eight inches long and with brilliant coloring.
This coloring arises from the desire of bird-dealers to have scarlet birds. They used to have plenty of deep-gold canaries, and in order to intensify this color, tried experiments in feeding saffron, cochineal, port wine, and beet-root to no avail; but finally a bird-keeper discovered that cayenne pepper was what he needed to turn yellow to scarlet and make his birds the sensation of the canary world.
My first canaries were, however, none of these thoroughbreds. In those days I did not think of raising young ones, and one day taking pity on some underfed, ugly birds in the house of a poor woman, I bought two and took them home with me. They were not clean and they were not pretty. The sickly, yellow one I named Jessie, the dark-green one with a pitiful attempt at a crest I called Minnie. Jessie did not live long. She had no constitution, and one of my Brazil cardinals took a dislike to her and struck her, and though I rescued her, she finally died. To replace her I got another—this one a prettier bird called Jennie.
My next canary was a thoroughbred, the son of an English prize bird. I paid five dollars for him, which was very cheap. I fell in love with him, as he nervously danced about his cage, and as long as I had him he was the most remarked bird in my aviary. He was much larger than the ordinary canary. His body was mottled green and yellow, his heavy crest hung so thick and drooping over his eyes that it partially obscured his sight, and the long, silky feathers of his body and legs made him look as if he had petticoats on. He was really a monstrosity, but was such a dear bird and so interesting, and withal so intelligent, that all the members of the family loved him.
He was terribly intense. I never before and never since have seen a bird that took such a vivid, picturesque interest in everything that went on around him. I put him in my study when I got him, and, tossing his head so that he could look under his drooping crest, he examined everything in the room and every one that came into it. To my delight he soon began to sing—a heavy, overpowering song, and as he sang he danced like a professional dancer, shaking and twisting and agitating his long feathers.