The Birdman of Alcatraz thread resparked something I’ve wondered several times. (The B of A mainly researched canaries.)
When I was a little kid (almost 40 years ago) my mother had one- bright yellow, sang several tunes- and her mother had one and some friends kept them as well. You could buy them at most pet stores. Now I know a lot of people who keep parakeets (so common you can buy them at WalMart) but even in pet stores that sell cockatiels and cockatoos and macaws and even the really expensive multi-thousand-dollar trained parrots you rarely, at least here anyway, see canaries anymore. Were they discovered to be especially harmful to people? Or is there some kind of blight that decreased their population and made them more expensive?
Not that I want one (I don’t do birds), but just curious.
Good question, Sampiro, and I’ve searched around on avian pet sites for a good answer, and haven’t found one. I remember them being in every pet store as a kid as well. One possible reason may be that canaries require more flight space to thrive than the other caged birds; perhaps the mortality rate was high in run of the mill pet stores. I searched for disease and importation parameters, but couldn’t find an obvious reason that they aren’t in non-specialty stores.
I did find that there are many breeders, and varieties, and the going price is about $50-100, way more than the birds in small pet store cages in our youth. Now, really curious about it. Colibri, any clues here???
Canary trivia: Warner Bros. cartoon Tweety is a canary.
This is really pitiful. Rooster fighting, I can kinda get, it has a macho drama, although I think it cruel, but, canaries? Betting on itty bitty birds fighting, cripes, get a friggin’ life !
Isn’t it more likely they went the way of the pet store? That canaries were cost-effective so long as no one paid any attention to the conditions in which they were acquired / bred / kept, but by today’s standards are too expensive?
I’ve never actually noticed this before, and haven’t thought about it. The only reason I can think of might be that parrots including budgies would seem to form more of a bond with and interact more with their owners, thus making them more popular.
If that were the case, though, Colibri, then I wouldn’t see zebra finches and black hooded nuns in every pet store I visit.
Only thing I can come up with is finches and canaries are possibly more fragile, and thus harder to keep. Difference is (may be?)–finches are far cheaper to replace.
They’re also generally prettier to look at. Canaries are brightly colored, but they’re pretty much a solid yellow, orange or tannish-gold. Finches have more varied patterns of color, and some species are MUCH more varicolored.
I wonder if they’re just rarer because there are more different birds available now? I haven’t been in a pet store in a few years, but I seem to recall them having much more variety than the pet stores I went to as a kid. Do pet stores have access to more different birds now than they used to? I could see floor space being an issue - if you’re gonna have ten birds, might as well have ten different ones if you can.
Hmm. Those are very pretty. Most of the ones I’ve seen in pet stores look more like this. Of course those are also the cheap ones (and admittedly I haven’t looked that hard- majorly allergic to feather dust).
Yeah but I recall a few cartoons when Tweety was referred to as “the rare Tweetybird” implying that he was a separate species, though by the time he was paired with Sylvester in his own mystery series he was definately a canary
“Big Bird” is also a canary though it can be debated. His official latin name is “Bigus canarius” so I’d assume he’s at least related to a canary.
Peter Brady is also a canary, remember when he joined the Glee Club and the other guys on the football team called him a “canary,” till Decon Jones sorted them out. Of course today Peter would’ve been called a lot worse things
I was unaware that one could buy Mardi Gras finches.
Frankly, I find canaries and finches (no matter how brightly colored) to be rather boring. I think that budgies offer much more interaction. However, I have to admit that my only exposure to finches and canaries have been at a friend’s house or in the pet store, and I have actually owned a few budgies in my time. I used to very, very gently scratch my budgies’ teensy little chins, and they’d puff up their feathers and close their eyes and very nearly purr for me. I never knew of a finch or canary that would do anything similar, but then I did interact with my birds a lot more than my friends did.
Since I now have cats, I don’t have birds, but I do look at them in the various pet stores. Canaries are always on display. There’s also at least one canary in the hospital avary, which contains several finches as well. The aviary is completely glass enclosed, for health reasons as well as safety reasons I imagine.
“A story I heard years ago” was that old time bird seed contained some hemp (cannabis) seeds which made canaries happy thus sing a lot. The feds pressured the bird seed companies to not use the hemp seeds anymore (so that Dirty Hippies wouldn’t use the seeds to grow Marihuana), the birds stopped singing so much and popularity declined.
Just read a lengthy section on pot in a very interesting book The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. He discusses how hemp and cannabis derive from the same original plant, but over thousands of years hemp plants have been selected and bred for the strength and length of their fibers, and cannabis was selected and bred for its psychoactive and medicinal powers. So nowadays hemp produces negligible THC, and cannabis a worthless fiber. Yet the US government treats both the same. Gotta love US drug policy!
I don’t know how many people kept canaries a genration ago, nor do I know whether the number has risen or fallen since.
But for what it’s worth, my local Petco has loads of canaries for sale, along with parakeets, finches and cockatiels. So, SOMEBODY must still be buying them.
