If the little bird singing in your window is insignificant in appearance, but has an exquisite song, he probably came from the Hartz Mountains. Very likely the principal income of the inhabitants of the village in which he was hatched, is derived from canary-raising.
They have bird schoolrooms with a school-teacher’s box in which will be found an old bird, trained by a lark or a nightingale. When the time comes the cover is raised from the teacher’s box. As he sees the light he bursts into a sweet, beautiful song, in long, low trills, deep rolls, flutes, turns, bells, bubbles, and other exquisite technicalities. The young birds stop feeding to listen, and in time, they too become perfect. The Germans educate their birds as thoroughly as they do their human singers, and they command excellent prices for them.
When the little birds are fully trained, some of the best are kept at home, and the others come in immense and valuable shipments to America in the tiny wicker cages. There is often great suffering among them. The voyage may be rough or disease may break out. The bird-dealers are said to do all they can to protect them, and only send experienced men with them, but the birds have many enemies, notably rats. Their attendants must watch day and night to protect their tiny charges.
It seems as if there might be American schools for canaries, if they must still be sold for cage-birds. A bird hates travel, and one shudders to think of the sufferings of our little feathered friends on the long journeys.
One day I found in Halifax one of these little German birds. He had just come from New York, and I bought him, took him home, and called him St. Andreasberg and Andy for a nickname. His only blemish was a pair of very scaly legs. That meant either old age or disease. However, they soon improved, though he has never had really smooth legs and claws.
He was a tiny fellow, pale yellow with a suspicion of black over one eye. He was not a first-class singer, but he had long, rippling notes, and when I heard him sing for the first time I was enraptured. I had never heard a lark sing, nor a nightingale. Andy’s notes gave me some idea of what their song would be, for he was evidently a trained singer.
I got another little German bird for him, and the two have been model parents, raising one set of young Germans after another, until now I have their descendants to the third and fourth generations. They don’t all sing as well as he does. If I had shut them up in a room with him, they might have done so, but I let them all go in the aviary, and mixing with Norwich’s family, they soon learned to sing partly in the English way.
It is very amusing to hear one of these German birds begin his father’s strain then break off and sing in Norwich’s style. Only one German bird—Andy’s first young one—sings almost the same song that his father does.
I am delighted with the flight of these birds—the offspring of caged birds. Norwich never learned to fly well. He had a kind of scalloping flight, but all his young ones fly like wild birds. Andy’s are just as swift, and I find that these birds raised in an aviary are invariably stronger and larger than their parents. Greater variety of food and more exercise account for this.
Though I gave Norwich his liberty, I kept Andy in a cage for years. His eldest son hated him, and that brings me to one of the mysteries of bird life. The father and mother are devotion itself while bringing up a set of nestlings. They really seem to love the tiny creatures so dependent on them that they would perish if left to themselves. However, when the time comes for young birds to leave the nest or, rather, when the time comes for them to feed themselves—for most parents feed them for some days after they have stepped out, or have been pushed out of their home—the parents are either indifferent to them or are apparently cruel to their formerly beloved offspring. They fly away from them, they often push and beat them, they usually seem to have no affection for them. Andy fed his little son until he was old enough to feed himself, then he turned against him and did not want him in the big cage with him.