The grand canary experiment

            When I told people last year that I was going to breed canaries, they laughed.  You’ll never pull it off, they said.  You’re an amateur!  What do you know about raising canaries?

            Okay, maybe “they” didn’t quite say that.  Okay, maybe no one really cared.  But I had doubts.

We bought a nest, put two canaries who we suspected were male and female into the same cage, then let nature take its course.  When the first blue eggs were laid in February, we became quite excited, but that excitement quickly fizzled when we realized they were only good with bacon (no, I didn’t try them!)

The caged canary life begins...

This laying of dud eggs continued for some time until finally we heard a faint peeping noise underneath our canary hen in early May.  Lo and behold, the canary experiment had worked!  Two days later, the second chick hatched, followed by a third. 

Quite quickly we had to learn how to ensure they would have the most productive chickhood possible.  We got all the books, all the videos, attended pre-chick classes, etc.  Fortunately, chickhood goes by quite quickly.

There’s the kind-of-cute stage, where they’re covered with fuzz and can only make small peeps.  Then there’s the ugly, awkward teenage phase, where they don’t quite have feathers and resemble lizards.  Then there’s the almost fully developed, out of the nest young adult stage, where they can actually be on their own while their mother lays another clutch of eggs, as she promptly did.  She didn’t waste any time actually, as she inserted herself into the nest with her chicks to begin her second clutch (now we’re hoping for chick-less eggs.)

The ugly stage

All of this happens over four weeks.  We like to talk about how quickly children grow up, but this takes it to a whole new level.  Imagine the progress human society could make if we didn’t have to spend all that time raising our young ones! 

There are some interesting observations I’ve made through the process, with some parallels to humans.  One is that the oldest chick grows the quickest and is ultimately the most successful.  Okay, I don’t know about the successful part, but as the oldest sibling in my family, I like to make something of this.  Canary breeders often remove eggs as soon as they’re laid and replace them with dummy eggs.  They then place all the real eggs back under the hen to ensure that the chicks hatch at the same time.  This prevents one chick from growing much faster than the others and potentially starving the youngest.

Although I tried this at first with the dud eggs, I soon gave up on it.  Why should I change nature’s way?  The younger chicks, I’ve read, actually have more testosterone in them to compensate for their size.  That’s why you get such feisty younger siblings.  In the case of humans, it’s because they understand as soon as they’re born that they’ll have to fight for attention every step of the way.

The eldest, first to leave the nest

Along with the eggs, I’ve learned that young dads can be duds, too.  While a male canary typically helps the female by feeding the chicks, ours was worse than the stereotypical deadbeat dad.  If he was simply disinterested, that would’ve been better.  But no, he would peck at the nest, chase after his partner, abuse her while she was sitting on her eggs.  The mating season never ended for this stud. 

I suppose we forced him into parenthood too early – he’s only one year old, after all.  We had no choice but to step in and separate him from his family.  Shameless, I know.  But it was our first try, after all.