pulling and tugging, doing her best to hang on and backing off with her wings, trying to pull it loose.
There’s another thing I like better about canaries than pigeons. Pigeons do a lot of walking. They swing their short bodies back and forth like a duck and walk around on short legs, or sometimes when they’re courting, they pull themselves up and take short soldier-like marching steps. Canaries never walk. If they move on the ground, they hop. Most times a hop means a little flit with the wings. It makes them look so independent. They hop in place, then hop to another place. I’ve noticed robins both running and hopping but canaries never walk.
Sometimes, Birdie’d just hop all over the cage. She’d pick up a tiny stone here and move it over there. She’d dig in the sand with her beak. She won’t bring anything out, just digging. It’s like she’s doing some kind of bird housekeeping.
Then, sometimes, she’ll hunch back and take a flying leap for the highest perch. This takes a careful aim because perches are spread all over the place. Mrs Prevost puts in lots of perches; she doesn’t think much about birds having long free places to fly. Birdie flies between the perches as if they aren’t there. She’s beautiful.
I go downtown and hunt around junk shops till I find a cage. It costs twenty-five cents. I take it home to fix up. First, I scrape all the paint and rust from the bars. There are two broken places; I repair them. I straighten and clean the tray in the bottom. I boil and wash out the food and water dishes. It isn’t a big cage, fifteen inches deep, thirty long and twenty high. I hate to think of taking poor Birdie away from the big cage and her friends to put her into this small cage, alone. I know I’ll make it up somehow.
After it’s all clean, I paint the cage white. I give it two coats till it looks practically new. I put some newspaper in the bottom, and bird gravel. I buy roller mix seed and put it in one cup and fresh water in the other. I’m ready to bring Birdie home.
I carry her on my bike in a shoe box with holes punched in the sides. I can hear her scrambling around inside, sliding on the slippery bottom of the box. I wonder what a bird thinks when her whole life is suddenly changed like this. She isn’t one year old and she’s lived her whole life either in the nest or the breeding cage, or in the aviary with other birds. Now she’s in a dark box with no perches, she can’t see and can’t fly. I speed home as fast as I can.
I go in the back door and up the back stairs to my room. I don’t want to show her to anyone.
I cut a hole carefully in the end of the box and put the hole next to the cage door. In only a few seconds she hops into the cage. She lands on the floor and stands straddle-legged. She looks around. She seems even more beautiful than she did in the aviary. I don’t want to scare her, so I back up to the other side of the room where I have my binoculars. I turn the chair around and rest the binoculars on the back of the chair so I can watch her without my arms getting tired.
After a few little hops, rattling sand on the paper, she hops up onto the middle perch and peeps. It’s a single note going from low to high and watery. It’s the first time I hear her voice. In the aviary, there’s so much sound you can’t hear any particular bird.
She cocks her head and looks from side to side. She knows I’m there across the room and she looks at me first with one eye, then the other. Canaries don’t look at any particular thing with both eyes at once. Most birds don’t. They only see with both eyes when they’re not really looking at anything. When they want to see something particular, they look with one eye and blind out the other. They don’t close it, just blind it.
Birdie moves lightly and quickly, heavy air means nothing. She hops up to the top perch and wipes her beak, sharpening it, checking, the way dogs sniff trees.
She’s yellow, the yellow of a lemon. Her tail feathers and wing tips are lighter, almost white. The feathers on her upper legs are lighter too. Her legs are orange-pink, lighter than pigeon legs, delicately thin. She has three toes forward and one back like all tree birds, and her nails are long and thin, translucent, with a fine vein down the center. She’s medium-sized for a canary and has a rounded, very feminine head; her eyes are bright black, her beak exactly the color of her legs. Small pink nostril holes are tucked under the feathers of her head at the top of her beak.
She peeps again and turns around on the perch to face the other way. She does this without seeming to use her wings. She springs lightly up, twists her body, and is facing the other way. It’s the same move an ice skater makes when she jump turns, only with much less effort. Birdie does this while still eyeing me left and right, shaking her head back and forth, a bird ‘no’.
Her eyes lose focus and she goes into total vision. She isn’t looking at me anymore. She jumps down to the bottom perch and sees the water cup. She tips her head in, dips her beak into the water, and tilts her head back. She does this three times. Like pigeons, she can’t swallow up. She lets the water flow down into her throat. It looks as if she closes her beak over a certain small quantity of water, not more than a drop, then holds it till she tilts up so it rolls down her throat.
After drinking, she hops to the floor of the cage. A bird needs sharp gravel to grind food in its crop. She hops around, making sand rattle on the paper again, takes a few grains, then jumps up on the bottom perch again for some birdseed.
The seed I’ve bought contains rape, a tiny black round seed; canary seed, a thin tan-colored shiny seed with a white fruit; rolled oats; and linseed. She dips into the food dish and spreads seeds around till she finds one of the rolled oats. She picks it up, peels off the shell and eats the fruit. It’s done quickly. While she’s eating, she looks over at me twice. Birds are very suspicious while they’re eating. She eats about five seeds; the rolled oat, two rape seeds and at least one canary seed. She uses a different technique to peel each type. She doesn’t eat any linseeds. Linseeds are to keep the feathers in condition.
It’s amazing how well birds can work seeds out of the shell using only their beaks; no arms, no hands.
Later, I try eating birdseed to see what it’s like. I spend hours cracking seed with my teeth. One mouthful takes a full hour. You can’t eat the shells because they’re bitter.
After Birdie’s eaten, she leaps with one slight flick of her wings, a hardly noticeable flick, from the bottom perch, turns around in midair and lands on the top perch, at least four times her height. It’s as if I jumped off the porch right up onto the roof. She peeps at me from there. I try to peep back.
She checks the bars of the cage with her beak and nibbles some cuttlebone. Cuttlebone is from a fish; it has calcium and other minerals for birds. She constantly tries to talk to me, or maybe she’s trying to discover any other birds around. There’s a sad sound in the peep, interrogative, going up at the end, peeEEP? She opens her beak half way when she says it and of ten says it just as she leaves one perch for another. Perhaps it’s a signal to let other birds know she’s changing position. I don’t really know enough about canaries.
When it gets dark, I cover her cage with a cloth to protect her from drafts.
The next day is Sunday. I see her trying to bathe in the water cup so I put a saucer of water in the cage. She goes down immediately with a peep that’s different from the others, shorter, more like PEep? She stands on the edge of the dish, shakes her feathers impossibly fast, stretches out her wings to show feathers individually, then throws herself into the water with another short PEep? She goes in and out, splashing, wiggling. There’s a concentration, a total involvement; nothing passive. I’ve watched hundreds of pigeons take baths in water or in dust but it was slow motion compared to Birdie.
After she’s splashed all the water from the saucer and made a soggy mess out of the newspapers on the floor of the
