CHAPTER VII

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A CANARY-BIRD

Sing away, aye, sing away. Merry little bird, Always gayest of the gay. Though a woodland roundelay You ne'er sung nor heard; Though your life from youth to age Passes in a narrow cage.

Near the window wild birds fly. Trees are waving round; Fair things everywhere you spy Through the glass pane's mystery. Your small life's small bound; Nothing hinders your desire But a little gilded wire.

Mrs. Craik.

He didn't look very much like a bird, being mostly a big little stomach, as bare of feathers as a beechnut just out of the burr, with here and there on the head and back a tuft of down. His eyelids bulged prominently, but did not open, sight being unnecessary in consideration of the needs of his large stomach. Said needs were partially satisfied every few minutes with the nursing-bottle.

And a very primitive nursing-bottle it was, being no other than the beak of the parent bird thrust far down the little throat, as is the family custom of the rest of the finches.

From somewhere in the breast of the mother a supply was always forthcoming, and found its way down the tiny throat of the baby and into the depths of its pudgy being. This food, which was moist and smooth, was very nourishing indeed, and sweet as well, for it tasted good, and left such a relish in the mouth that said mouth always opened of itself when the mother bird came near. But no more than its own share of the victuals did Dicky get, though he did his very best to have it all. There were other babies in the same cradle to be looked after and fed. And they all five were as much alike as five peas, excepting that Dicky was the smallest of all and was kept pushed well down in the bottom of the nest. This did not prevent his mother from noticing his open mouth when it came his turn to be fed.

Canary mothers have sharp eyes; so have canary fathers, as will be seen.

Now, when this particular pair of birds began to look about the cage for a good place to fix upon for family affairs, some kind hand from outside fastened a little round basket in one corner, exactly of the right sort to stimulate nesting business. It was an old-fashioned basket, with open-work sides and bottom, airy and clean. Now, had this basket been a box instead, we should have had no tragedy to record; or had the mesh been closely woven, no fatal mistake (though well meant) would have darkened the sky of this domestic affair. But alas! the truth must be told, since the biography we are writing admits of no reservations.

It all came about by the interference of the father bird, whose presence in the nursery should have been forbidden at the start. The mother was more than once alarmed by his activity and misapplied zeal about the nest, and she had scolded him away with emphatic tones.

Not having anything of importance to do save to eat all day and sleep all night, he was on the alert for employment. One dreadful morning, when the mother was attending to breakfast, this father canary espied some, tatters sticking out of the bottom meshes of the nest basket, bits of string ends and threads, carelessly and innocently overlooked.

"Ah," thought he, "here is something that ought to be attended to at once."

And he went to work! He thrust his sharp beak up between the round meshes of the basket bottom and pulled at every thread he could lay hold of, struggling beneath, fairly losing his foothold in his eagerness to pull them out. Having succeeded in dragging most of the material from beneath the birdlings, he caught sight of a few more straight pink strings lying across the meshes, and began tugging at them. The mother, feeding the babies from the edge of the nest above, noticed the little ones each in its turn crouching farther and farther into the bottom of the cradle, faintly opening their mouths as if to cry, but being too young and weak to utter a sound. It was a mystery, but the deepest mystery of it all was the fact that little Dicky, the dwarf of the family, came to the top as the rest worked down, and was getting more than his share of the breakfast.

About this time the mistress of the canary-cage came to see after her pets, and beheld a sight which made her scream as hard as if she had seen a mouse. There, beneath the nest, was the father bird tugging at protruding feet and legs of baby birds with all his might, growing more and more excited as he saw his supposed strings resisting his attempts to pull them through.

When the affair was looked into, there was but one bird left alive of the five little infants no more than five days old, and they were released from their predicament to have a decent burial in the garden at the foot of a motherly-looking cabbage head that stood straight up in disgust of the cruel affair, "as if she would ever have such a thing happen to her little cabbages!" True, she had no little cabbages of her own, but that made no difference.

Now that we have tucked away these four little canary-birds, who never saw the light of day, and therefore never could realize what they missed by not holding on harder to what little they had by way of feet and legs, we will drop the painful subject and attend to Dicky.

Of course the father bird was excluded from the nursery, as he should have been weeks before, and there was only one mouth to feed. And that mouth was never empty unless the owner of it was sleeping. In fact, the babe was stuffed; though, strange to say, his stomach grew no bigger, but less and less, as the rest of his body filled out.

At the end of a couple of weeks he had a pretty fair shirt on his back, of delicate down, softer than any shirt of wool that ever warmed a human baby's body. And the mother stood on the edge of the basket and admired it. She didn't make it, of course, but she was in some way responsible for it, and no doubt felt proud of the bit of fancy work. She noticed, also, that the eyes of the little one did not bulge so much as they did, and a tiny slit appeared at the center, widening slowly, until one happy hour they opened fairly out, and "the baby had eyes." But they were tired eyes to start with, like the eyes of most young things, and they wearied with just a glimpse of the light. So the lids closed, and it was several days before Dicky actually took in the situation as he ought.

There being no other baby to crowd, he kept to the nest longer than birds commonly do, and when at last he got on his feet he was pretty well fledged.

Now, when he had obtained his first youthful suit of clothes, his mother looked surprised, as did also his father, it is to be supposed, he in his solitary cage hanging close to the other. Both parent birds were pure-bred Teneriffe canaries, the male as green as emerald and the female more dusky and lighter. By a strange freak of nature, which happens sometimes by breeding these birds in captivity, the young fellow was bright yellow, of the tint of a ripe lemon, beak white, and eye black, while his feet and ankles retained their original baby pinkness. Oh, he was a pretty bird! But it was foreordained in his case, as in similar cases, that he should not be so sweet a singer as though his color had been like that of his parents. He was not conscious of this fact, however, and it mattered not to him that he was yellow instead of green. Nor did he care in the least that the price of him was marked down to a dollar and a half when it should have been double. Away he went in a new cage, after his new mistress had paid the sum named into the hand of his former owner. He peeked out of the bars as he was carried along swinging at every step; that is, he peeped out as well as he could, considering that a cloth was covered over the cage. The wind blew the cloth aside now and then and Dicky saw wonderful sights--sights that were familiar and "so soul-appealing." Not that he, in his own short life, had ever seen such sights, but that somehow in his little being were vague memories or conceptions of what his ancestors had seen. It is hard to explain it, but everything cannot be explained. When we come to one of these things we call it "instinct," with a wise shake of our heads, just as we were told to say "Jerusalem" when we came to a word we couldn't pronounce when we were very young and read in the Second Reader.

Well, Dicky had a good home of his own, and lived for a purpose, although he never developed into a trained singer. In the heart of him he longed for a mate, and often expressed his desires in low, musical notes. But no mate came to him, and he would sit for hours pondering on his bachelor's lot, and singing more notes.

Now, wild birds are constantly having something "happen" to them. They fly against a wire or get a wing hurt, or the young fall out of the nest and can't find their mother. Dicky's mistress was always on the lookout for such accidents, and she brought such birds into the house and nursed them and brought them back to health when possible. It occurred to her to offer a "calling" or "vocation" to Dicky. So she made a small private hospital of his cage, into which she placed the victims of accident or sickness as she found them. Dicky was surprised, never having seen a bird save his parents, and his lady-love in his dreams, and at first he stood on tiptoe and was frightened.

But he learned to be kind after a while, and to show his visitors where the food and water were kept, and to snuggle up to them on the perch when it came bedtime. Many and many a poor invalid did he aid in restoring to freedom and flight, until he became pretty well acquainted with the birds that nest in our grounds.

Year after year the good work went on, and Dicky developed more musical talent, until he sang sweetly, imitating the finches and linnets outside. In the fall of the year, when the wild birds were thinking of their annual migrations, Dicky himself grew restless and quit his songs. Then his mistress opened his door and told him he might "go." Not far away, of course, but all about in the room, that seemed to this caged bird as big as any world could be. In his quest for new nooks he came by accident upon the mirror above the fireplace. Standing on the edge of a little vase before the glass, just in front of the beveled edge of it, he espied two yellow birds, one in the glass itself and another in the beveled edge, as a strict law of science had determined should be the case.

In a second the whole bearing of the bird was changed. His feathers lay close, his legs stood long and slim, and his eyes bulged, as they never had bulged since the lids parted when he was two weeks old. Then he found voice. He sang as never a green bird sang sweeter. He turned his head and the two birds in the glass turned their heads. He preened his wing and the two birds preened each a wing. His little throat swelled out in melody, the tip of his beak pointing straight to the ceiling of the big room as if it were indeed the blue sky, and the two birds sang with uplifted beaks and swelling throats. They were of his own kind, his own race, his own ancestral comrades. And they were not green! The low mesas of the Canary Islands never resounded to such melody.

But melody was not food, at least so thought Dicky's mistress, as she tempted the bird in vain to eat. Not a crumb would he touch until placed back in his cage, where he straightway forgot his recent discoveries. As usual, he took his bread and cooky to the water-dish and set it to soak for dinner, and scattered his seeds about the cage floor in his eagerness to dispose of the non-essentials, the hemp only being, in his opinion, suitable for his needs. Of course he was obliged to pick up his crumbs after he had thus assorted the varieties.

Every day when the door was open he flew straight to the mirror. If we moved the vase to the middle, away from the beveled edge, he found the place by himself and stood on tiptoe exactly where the reflection accorded him the companionship of two birds, and he would resume his melody. It was real to him, this comradeship, and it lasted until actual and personally responsible companions were provided for him.

Now, let not the reader conjure up a picture of many birds in a cage with Dicky as governor or presiding elder. It was midsummer, when the sands are hot and inviting to the retiring and modest family known by name as "lizards." The particular branch of this family to which we refer, and to which Dicky was referred, is known to scientists, who would be precise of expression, as Gerrhonotus. But the familiar name of "lizard" is sufficient for the creatures we placed in a large wire cage on the upper balcony and designed for Dicky's summer companions.

Now, it should not seem strange to any one that we chose the lizard people to associate with this yellow-as-gold canary. Were they not one and the same long ages ago? And this is no legend, but fact. Have they not both to this day scales on their legs and a good long backbone? To be sure, the birds now have feathers on most of their bodies, so they may be able to fly; but a long while ago the bird had only scales, and not a single feather. And are not baby lizards hatched from eggs laid by the mother lizard? Ah, it is a long story, this, dating back too far to count. But long stories are quite the accepted fashion in natural science, and from reading them we resolved to make some observations of our own. There is more to be gained sometimes in making observations on one's own account than by adopting those of others.

We captured half a dozen lizards and gave them the names of Lizbeth, Liza, Liz, and Lize. That is, four of them, being of the same order, received these names; there were two little ones besides, with peacock-blue trimmings, which have nothing to do with this story. The four named were about eight inches in length, speckled above and silver beneath. Their other beauties and characteristics will not be discussed except as it becomes necessary in treating of Dicky's further development.

From the day when these five creatures became fellow-captives they were friends. The lizards took to sleeping in the canary's food-box, so that in getting at his meals he was obliged to peck between them, and sometimes to step over them and crowd them with his head after hidden seeds. As the afternoon sunshine slanted across the cage the five took their dry bath all in a heap, bird on top with wings outspread, lizards in a tangle, each and all thankful that there was such a thing as a sun bath or family descent. Later, as the sun was going down and the lizards became drowsy, as lizards will, Dicky sang them a low lullaby, now on the perch above them, now on the rim of the feed-box. At times another comrade joined them, especially at this choral hour.

One of those red and white striped snakes seen in ferns and brakes along watercourses made a home in the cage with the bird and the lizards. This snake had an ear for music; at the first notes he emerged from his lairnrid glided in his direction. If the bird were on the perch the snake would crawl up the end posts, taking hold with his scales, which, of course, were his feet, and lie at length on the perch at Dicky's feet, watching out of its beautiful eyes. At other times it would merely glide toward the bird, lift its head erect some five or six inches, and remain motionless until the song was finished. A big, warty hop-toad, also an inmate of this asylum, was a friend of Dicky's, as indeed was every creature, even to the big grasshopper. This toad and the bird were often seen in the bath together, the toad simply squatting, as is the custom of toads, the bird splashing and spattering the water over everything, including, of course, the toad. The toad blinked and squatted flatter to the bottom of the bath, hopping out when the bird was done, and the two sunning themselves after nature's own way of using a bath-towel.

It would be too long a story were one to tell of the songs Dicky sang to the drone of the drones bumming away against the wire, sorry perhaps that they were to become dinner to lizards before summer was half over. But we must bring the biography to an end, hoping that these few reminiscences will tend to interest people in the "Dickies" that are about them in wire cages, too often neglected and never half comprehended.

But we should by all means give an account of the last we ever saw of this particular Dicky.

During his stay on the balcony he had become acquainted with the finches and linnets and mocking-birds of the yard, holding quiet talks with them in the twilight, and growing more thoughtful at times, even to the extent of watching for opportunities to escape. One evening, just as we lifted the door to set in a fresh pan of water, out darted Dicky. Straight to a tree near by he flew, and called himself over and over again. We cried to him, "Dicky, O Dicky, come back."

Ah, but here was a taste of freedom--the freedom which his ancestral relatives had enjoyed on the low slopes of Teneriffe before ever a foreign ship had carried them away captive. And Dicky had never read a word about his ancestors and their freedom! Therefore, what did he know about it? Scientists call it "instinct." It is a word too hard for us, and we will say "Jerusalem" and let it pass. Away across the street flew Dicky, the bird of prison birth, the bird of only two comrades of his kind and color, and these but shadows in a mirror.

The lizards heard us call, and peeped lazily over the edge of the hammock seed-box, blinking sleepily, and then cuddled down again without sense of their loss.

Running after the bird did not bring him back, as everybody knows to his sorrow who has once tried it. A glint of gold in the pine-tree, a radiance as of lemon streamers in and out of the cypress hedge, and we saw Dicky no more.

My bird has flown away, Far out of sight has flown, I know not where. Look in your lawn, I pray, Ye maidens kind and fair, And see if my beloved bird be there.

Find him, but do not dwell With eyes too fond on the fair form you see, Nor love his song too well; Send him at once to me, Or leave him to the air and liberty.

_From the Spanish._

Some day a budding ornithologist, more eager than wise, with note-book and pencil, will possibly record a "new species" among the foothill trees--a species that resembles both yellow warbler and goldfinch. And the young man will look very knowing, all alone out in the woods; and he will send his specimen to the National Museum for identification. And the museum people will shake their wiser heads and inform the "ornithologist" that, in their opinion, there is more of the ordinary tame canary "let loose" in the individual than goldfinch or warbler.

Let it pass.

A bird for thee in silken bonds I hold, Whose yellow plumage shines like polished gold; From distant isles the lovely stranger came, And bears the far-away Canary's name.

Lyttleton.