The young birds developed wonderfully, and in three weeks were as large as their parents, and had hopped out of the nest. Fortunately, these were fine, large birds, more like the handsome father than the dowdy mother, but as time went by I saw the importance of careful selection in the mating of birds. I had and have children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of my handsome Norwich and underbred Minnie. Many of these birds are strong, and nervous, and handsome like the father. Several of them have been subject to mysterious decline and death. There the poor blood on the mother’s side of the house comes in. Have good parents and you have good offspring.
As soon as the warm weather came I put Norwich and Minnie out on the roof-veranda. Now they were happy, and disproved all the nonsense that is talked about caged birds preferring a cage to liberty. I grant that a canary always has a certain lack of fear with regard to a cage. He will enter it to feed, even to sleep, but if you leave the door open he will spend more time outside of it than in it.
Any of my canaries would fly about the street outside our house and would return to the roof-veranda. I have no doubt but what I could have allowed many of them this liberty all the time if it had not been for the cats. These cats were most amusing. I am fond of the cat tribe, and could not find it in my heart to be angry with them, for they were so perfectly open and frank in their demands for birds.
One old fellow would follow me about the garden as I looked for green stuff for the birds. His mouth was wide open, he was fairly yelling for a nice plump pigeon or canary, or a bright-headed foreigner.
“Pussy, it is quite impossible,” I would say gravely; “I love those birds, I cannot give them to you to crunch to pieces in your jaws.”
“Me-ow, wow!” he would cry in despair, and would go and sit close to the aviary windows and watch them.
The birds did not mind him, nor the other half-dozen felines that gazed with him. They only minded the nocturnal ventures of the cats, for there were enterprising ones that climbed the twenty feet into the air of the wire elevator and promenaded over the roof of the second story of the house. Often at night I have been awakened by a cry of distress from a bird or a sound of wings beating against the wire netting and, stealing out, have found an adventurous pussy on the roof. These cats never went down the way they came up. Every few mornings I had the task of inducing my cat friends to return to terra firma.
One day I was amused to see a neighbor’s child with a lone kitten in his hands, begging an old cat to come down off the roof to her young one. She did not, till I assisted her—this time, I think, by means of a bean-pole. Finally, a cat got up on the roof, and would not come down. No kind of persuasion touched her. So I sent for a carpenter and a ladder, and after he brought pussy down I had him put a wide board round the elevator that said, “so far and no farther,” to the cats.
To return to Norwich and his first nest of baby birds, and also his subsequent ones. I think I allowed him and Minnie to raise three sets of young ones this first summer, though two would have been enough, so great a strain on the mother is the rearing of nestlings.
I wanted to know whether the father bird taught the babies to sing. I used to watch these young ones when they began to listen to the singing around them, and made first faint, hoarse efforts at song themselves. Norwich too listened to them with evident pleasure, and sang a great deal himself, in a way that showed the act of singing was a relief to his nervous, excitable nature. He was apparently not trying to teach them. He sang when angry or glad—he wanted to express his own emotion.