finding any place in the aviary where he isn’t invading the territory of number-one son.
I still haven’t lost any birds. Mr Lincoln gives me some great ideas for tonics. I soak seed and mix it with egg food and cereal. I give them apples, lettuce, and dandelion leaves.
Counting Alfonso and Birdie, there are twenty birds – twelve males and eight females. The only sure breeding pair I have is Alfonso and Birdie. I could line-breed to Alfonso with one of the females but he’s so good with Birdie, I hate to break it up. It’s hard to do, but I decide to sell, or trade off, all the females. I need new blood; I can’t breed brother to sister. Some of these females are beautiful, and I hate to sell them. I feel like a slave trader.
I’m going to run fifteen breeding couples, so I need three more males as well as the females. I hunt around for two months before I find the kind of males I want. The trouble is it’s hard to see how well they fly, even in flight cages. The birds can’t get up any real speed.
One male I buy is what’s called a cinnamon. He’s sort of a golden-brown color. He’s long and slim like Alfonso, but his song type is what is called Saxon; sort of half roller.
Another male is yellow except for a black head and a topknot. A topknot has his hair parted and combed out from the center of his head. He looks as if he’s wearing a hat. This one looks almost like a clown. If you breed two topknots together you get a bald-headed bird. Mr Lincoln is disgusted that I’d buy a topknot. He doesn’t like any of the fancy birds. But this topknot can really fly. Also, he’s incredibly good at hovering. Canaries don’t hover much but this topknot can hover around the top of an aviary like a hawk hunting. He can also do a fair glide. Finches generally aren’t much for gliding, so, I have to have him.
The last one I get from Mr Lincoln. Mr Lincoln gives me the bird for nothing. He’s convinced this bird’s crazy. It keeps flying into the sides of the aviary. Most birds learn fast just what a cage is and how wire is. They get so they fly up against the cage but swing their feet up and grab hold. Only a baby bird will actually butt its head against the wire of a cage.
Now, this bird won’t recognize the cage. It’s full-grown but he’ll fly head-on against the wire as if it isn’t there. As a result he spends a fair amount of time on the bottom of the cage recovering from crashes. Mr Lincoln says he’s born stubborn dumb. I try to trade one of my dark females for him but Mr Lincoln doesn’t even want that. He says he thought of me as soon as he noticed this stupid bird.
I trade away the females one for one. Mrs Prevost takes most of them and gives me the pick of hers. She’s glad I’m going to breed one male to a female. I spend two weeks in her cages trying to pick her best flying females. I work out a system. I borrow a stopwatch from school and watch a particular bird for five minutes. I only count the time the bird is actually in the air. I want my birds to like flying. I check each bird three times then add in such things as gracefulness and speed of flight. When I’m finished I have all the birds ranked on a flying scale. I’m also trying to avoid birds who are plain clumsy. This type will come in for a landing and stumble or crash into other birds. They’ll do a lot of crazy fluttering when they try to land on a perch in a tight space between other birds. I’m also avoiding any female who sings or fights. All the books say these are bad signs for a breeding bird. Singing females have a tendency to abandon the nest. I get my lists finished and give them to Mrs Prevost. There’re a few of her best breeders on the list and she won’t sell or trade those, but I get most of what I want.
When I have all these birds in my flight cages it’s beautiful. It’s great to see a cage full of fine flying birds. These females fly much more than the males.
There’re still two months before the breeding season starts, so I continue with flying experiments. It’s cold out in the aviary now, so I dress up in all my warm clothes when I go out to watch. I’ve got my mother convinced it’s all part of raising canaries.
Now that the birds are full-grown, I experiment with flight feathers. A feather, if you look at it carefully, is incredible. It’s designed so that when pressure is put under it, no air can pass through. At the same time, air can pass through from the top easily. The feather has a hollow shaft with feeders for circulation of blood. On each side of the shaft grow out branches called barbs. These branch again into things called barbules which have little barbicles with hooks on the end. They all interlock and can be pulled apart or put together like a complicated fine-tooled zipper. The feather can be zipped and unzipped by the bird with its beak. This is what birds are doing when they run their feathers through their beaks; rezipping feathers that’ve come apart.
Also, the feathers rotate on an axis, so they can be vertical on the upswing and horizontal on the down. All this complication is built into something weighing practically nothing; light as a feather. The feather is the thing I’m up against. Either I have to make something like it or learn to do without.
I start pulling flight feathers from my hero birds, the ones who flew with their own weight hanging on their legs. I put the weights back on and pull one flight feather out from each wing. One gives up immediately. All that weight and now this. He sits on the bottom of the cage and tries to sleep. I take the weights off and let him free. He flies without trouble after a few minutes. Apparently, missing two flight feathers isn’t much to a canary if he isn’t weighted down. The other one manages flight of a sort. It’s a desperate frantic flight but he gets off the ground and makes it up to some of the first perches. I decide to leave the weights on and see how he compensates.
At the end of a week there’s definite improvement. He gets so he can struggle his way to the top perch of the aviary. He stays up there most of the time and his flights down are hellish. They’re hardly flight, more plummeting nose dives. He spins down, missing all the perches, flapping his wings frantically. Still, he survives and manages the tough flight up again. I figure he’s suffered enough for science and take off the weights.
In the meantime, I’m working nights on designs for mechanical feathers. I’m using designs like Venetian blinds, pivoting on pins. They close on the downstroke and open on the up. I use a bent driveshaft run by a rubber-band motor to make them flap. I’m making models in both balsa wood and thin aluminum. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of strength to activate enough flapping power in wings large enough to lift me. One big trouble is that birds flap their wings by pulling them forward on the upstroke and pushing back at the same time they flap down. It’s almost like a butterfly breaststroke in swimming. They trap air under the wings and push against it. The joint of a bird’s wing moves in a circle, clockwise into the direction of flight. It’s hard to work this out with a rubber-band motor. I get some of my models to fly but they won’t take off, they only fly when I launch them by hand. If I can’t get these little models to fly, I don’t have a chance.
I’m still doing my exercises. I flap an hour in the morning and an hour at night. I try to twist my shoulders in circles, grabbing air under my armpits. That’s the way birds seem to do it. I’m flapping with weights in my hands now. My shoulders and neck are beginning to get bumpy. If I’m not careful, I walk around with my head sticking out in front of me.
I work in the afternoons on the cages. It’s really great seeing them, all painted, with feed cups attached. I’ve painted the insides of the cages light blue. I have everything ready, newspaper in the floor of each cage and gravel on the newspaper. I’ll have to change all that about once a week. The nests are in place and there’s cuttlebone for each cage. I have feed in the seed cups and water in the automatic watering trough.
The breeding lists are worked out and I have my pairs decided upon. It was fun doing all the matching. I’ll be at school and I’ll get a new breeding idea. I’ve watched all the birds until I know every one of them and they all know me. I’ve made out breeding books to keep track of the young and I’ve bought bands to put on their legs for identification.
