America’s Favorite Bird
The craze for canaries lasted for more than a century, with imports reaching half a million birds each year. But even after they went out of style, the canary's impact on culture remains.
Shrewdness. Intelligence. Capability to endure a vast amount of exposure and hardship. Skill at telling male and female birds apart. These were the most important characteristics to succeed in the international canary trade, at least according to George Holden, who painted a vivid portrait of the arduous work of ferrying the birds from their birthplace in Europe to a pet store in America in his 1888 book Canaries and Cage-Birds.
At that time, the United States was importing well over one hundred thousand canaries every year, and this number was only growing. These birds mostly came from Germany, where there were entire villages whose primary industry was breeding and selling canaries. Shipping these birds was an exhausting, treacherous work that rested on the backs – sometimes literally – of traveling merchants. Holden wanted bird owners to know to whom they owed their gratitude when they purchased a canary from the corner pet store. To that end he recounted how a traveler he called “Fritz” chaperoned the birds across the Atlantic.
Fritz’s journey started in Saxony’s Harz mountains, where he spent weeks walking village to village visiting breeders and buying up canaries born earlier that spring. He was careful to only purchase males, since female canaries don’t sing. Each canary came packed in its own little cage, whose manufacture was a cottage industry in itself. Fritz hoisted as many as two hundred birds in two hundred cages onto his back and walked until he reached a train station that could carry him to the port cities of Bremen or Hamburg.
The best canaries that Fritz arrived with were kept for the German market, where discerning buyers were willing to pay more than fifty dollars for the best singers. But these fine distinctions were mostly lost on Americans. Instead, the ones sent to New York were the hardiest birds, those most likely to survive the weeks-long voyage over cold and stormy seas.
Fritz was entrusted with 1,400 such birds, and loaded them all in the steerage compartment on board a transatlantic steamer. Every day, each individually-caged bird had to be fed and watered, and every cage cleaned. These monotonous tasks easily stretch to ten hours, but might be double that if the ship was pitching in rough seas and if sick birds need attention. Through it all, he had to constantly guard against cats, rats, and humans hoping to snatch one of the precious birds. If Fritz could make it to New York with 85 percent of his canaries still breathing, both he and his employer would be happy.
George Holden wanted to help bird owners “imagine for a moment the dangers through which the feathered emigrants have passed in their younger days while coming to this country.” This flood of avian migrants sustained the canary’s position as America’s most popular pet bird for more than a century. Even when the birds went out of style, they left a permanent mark on our culture.
Canaries get their name from the Canary Islands, which is the original home of the wild birds from which the domestic canaries descended. The islands themselves are named for the large dogs – canines – that caught the attention of the first Spanish sailors to pay a visit.
There are a lot of stories explaining how the birds first made it to Europe, but the one that’s most entertaining is that a ship carrying a few cages of wild canaries crashed near the Italian coast, and as his last act the boat’s captain freed the birds to fly to shore to save them from drowning at sea. Whether or not this actually happened, canaries were well-established as European pets by 1500.
Wild canaries are small finches with streaked greenish-yellow plumage on their breasts and brownish feathers on their wings and tail. But fanciers learned pretty quickly that just as with dogs and horses, they could draw out different desirable characteristics through selective breeding and crosses with closely-related species. Some of the birds that emerged from this experimentation are the bright canary-yellow ones we’re most familiar with today. But amateur Darwins in every region of Europe set about discovering what other mutations they could squeeze out of their hapless feathered subjects. The results were incredibly varied, and frequently bizarre.
You can find canaries with colors that range from deep black to pure white to splotchy red, with every pattern and shade in between. “Frilled” canaries are bred for their fluffy, disheveled feathers, while feathers on lizard canaries look like scales and crested canaries sport aggressive bangs. Each country in Europe developed their own prized breeds: the oversized Lancashire canaries of England; the Spanish timbrado canaries with their metallic-sounding voice; the Belgian canaries with their obscenely hunched backs. But most prized of all are the German rollers, both bred and trained for their famous lilting song.
Americans had always imported pet birds from Europe, but the prolonged voyage by sail was hard on small birds, meaning that they only arrived by the handful. Europe had a robust internal trade in pet canaries, but they only started reaching America in bulk once steam power dramatically shortened the time it took to cross the ocean.
The brothers Charles and Henry Reiche were the first to figure out the logistics of bringing the birds over in bulk. By the 1850s they were moving ten thousand canaries between Germany and New York every year, and they could hardly keep pace with the growing demand. “The fancy has increased so much in this country,” wrote Charles and Henry, “that in the last year, 1871, sixty thousand canary birds found their way to this market, of which forty-eight thousand were imported by ourselves.”1
As the trade in canaries grew, keeping foreign songbirds became more accessible to middle-class consumers. Canaries were even carried westward by homesteaders, where they were kept in Missouri cabins and Nebraska sod homes. As the “universal parlor bird,” canaries represented the domestic ideals that settlers hoped to establish on the frontier. At the same time, for the ever-growing number of Americans living in cities, keeping a pet canary was one way to connect to the countryside that was quickly slipping away.
Before long, canaries appeared in every pet shop and pharmacy display. During the Christmas rush in 1905, a Philadelphia department store sold 4,000 canaries. Carnivals gave them out as prizes like goldfish or teddy bears. One fair went through 97,000 birds in a single season.2
Why were canaries so popular? As one US Department of Agriculture publication explained, “so simple are its requirements in the way of food and care that it needs little attention, and because of its pleasing songs and interesting habits it is a universal favorite.”3
Another reason for their popularity was that it was getting a lot harder to keep wild native birds as pets. Driven by the growing belief that caging wild mockingbirds and robins was cruel and ecologically harmful, enough states passed laws protecting wild birds from capture that by 1907 “the once extensive trade in native American birds has dwindled to the vanishing point.”4 In contrast, given their centuries of domestication, canaries were believed to live happily in a cage and displayed “little of the fear shown by wild birds in captivity.”5
At the turn of the century, Americans were importing 300,000 birds every year, and four out of every five of them were canaries. But they didn’t care much for the fancy breeds so prized in England and Germany. As long as the birds were yellow and had a pretty voice, the undiscerning American buyer was content. There were some who experimented with breeding the birds locally, but they did so without organization or attention to pedigree. Compared to the 200 societies dedicated to aviculture throughout Europe in 1900, the United States didn’t have a single one. One critic described the distinct American breed of canary that emerged from this mess:
“This variety cannot be traced to any distinct origin. He descends from an astonishing number of classes; and his ancestors, in most cases, lay about as much claim to thorough breeding and nobility of race as the traditional yellow dog.”6
No matter how popular canaries were becoming, America still depended almost entirely on Germany and Great Britain for its supply. But when the two countries went to war in 1914, shipments of birds from Europe trickled to a halt. It was only then that canary fanciers awoke to the economic possibilities that canary breeding presented.
Clubs dedicated to breeding particular types of the birds sprang up around the country. Canary boosters heralded the hobby as an entrepreneurial activity with low start-up costs and available to “those who must necessarily remain in the home, the aged, the women and children, or the semi-invalid, something that will afford them both profit and pleasure, and that is clean and wholesome.”7 Even the US Department of Agriculture lent its support, publishing a circular on caring for the birds “to meet the requests continually received for information on the care of canaries in sickness and health.”8
In the roaring twenties, canaries were ascendant. Presidential preferences are one indicator of pet popularity, and during that decade both Calvin Coolidge and Warren G. Harding kept canaries at the White House (before them, John Tyler, Zachory Taylor, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Grover Cleveland also kept the birds).
As soon as peace returned to Europe, canary imports from Germany soon exceeded their previous levels. Between sales of birds, birdseed, accessories, and cages, the market for canaries reached $30 million in 19259 — worth over half a billion dollars today. Advances in transportation technology also helped move the trade forward — in 1930 the airship Graf Zeppelin carried the first transatlantic shipment of wildlife by air, including 539 canaries, a gorilla, and a chimpanzee.10
Nothing marked the degree of their popularity over other birds than the fact that the government office responsible for keeping track of animal imports categorized birds into three groups: canaries, game birds, and “miscellaneous.” But using this data, we can also see the moment that their popularity began its decline. In 1929, canary imports nearly reached 600,000, which would prove to be their all-time high. That year also marked the beginning of the Great Depression. Canary shipments dropped continuously for the next decade as fewer and fewer households had discretionary income they could put toward new pets. By the time Germany dragged the world into a second horrible war, canary imports (and efforts to keep track of them) had entirely stopped.
Just like after the first world war, the canary trade rebounded when peace was restored. But it would never return to the heights of the 1920s. During the war years, domestic canary breeders again stepped in to fill the void, but the blockade of Europe also opened the door to the exotic bird trade from South America and Asia.
Some zealous bureaucrat briefly resumed collecting data on foreign bird imports from 1968 to 1972, which is enough to show us that canaries had become just one pet bird among many, struggling to stay relevant in a market flooded by dozens of more exotic options. Canaries were still the most commonly imported species, but waxbills, strawberry finches, nuns, parakeets, and mynahs were breathing down their necks. By 1971, Americans were importing more parrots than canaries.
But the bigger picture was that the popularity of all pet birds, not just canaries, was dwindling. In 1928, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post estimated that 16 percent of American households owned a canary. By 1987, just six percent of households kept a pet bird of any species. By 2016, this number was down to just three percent, compared to the 25 percent of households with cats and 38 percent owning dogs. Put another way, John F. Kennedy’s daughters kept a few pet canaries, but his successor, Lyndon Johnson, opted instead for lovebirds. No president since has brought a feathered pet to the White House.
This wasn’t just a matter of evolving tastes. There were also deeper shifts in the way people felt about the morality of keeping pet birds. Under intense pressure from conservationists, congress passed a law in 1918 that made it illegal to cage the country’s native birds. In the 1970s, it passed more laws banning the importation of wild parrots, severely limiting a trade that was driving some South American species toward extinction.
But even if keeping pet canaries has become unfashionable, the birds have secured a permanent place in our culture and language. Canaries get their own shade of yellow. Sesame Street’s Big Bird is a canary, as is Tweety from the Looney Toons. Somewhat less famous are the Sioux Falls Canaries, the minor-league baseball team near my home town in South Dakota. But you can hardly go a day without hearing about the most famous canaries, namely the metaphorical ones in coal mines. In my next post, I’ll talk about how canaries ended up underground in the first place, as well as how we’ve put a bunch of other birds to work.
Reiche, Charles. The Bird Fancier's Companion: Or, Natural History of Cage Birds; Their Food. United States: C. Reiche & Brother, 1871.
Evans, Mara. “Rollers and Choppers.” The Saturday Evening Post. United States: G. Graham, January 7, 1928.
Wetmore, Alexander. Canaries, Their Care and Management. US Department of Agriculture: Farmer’s Bulletin No. 1327. 1924.
Oldys, Henry. “Cage-Bird Traffic of the United States.” US Department of Agriculture. Yearbook of agriculture. 1906. N.p.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1907.
Wetmore, Alexander. Canaries, Their Care and Management. US Department of Agriculture: Farmer’s Bulletin No. 1327. 1924.
Holden, George H.. Canaries and Cage-birds: The Food, Care, Breeding, Diseases and Treatment of All House Birds .... United States: G.H. Holden, 1888.
Mayberry, Amelia Jane. American Canary Bird Culture. United States: Whittier News Company, 1924.
Wetmore, Alexander. Canaries, Their Care and Management. US Department of Agriculture: Farmers Bulletin No. 1327. 1924.
Evans, Mara. “Rollers and Choppers.” The Saturday Evening Post. United States: G. Graham, January 7, 1928.
Banks, Richard C.. Wildlife Importation Into the United States, 1900-1972. United States: Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, 1976.
By the time I came along in the 50s, my parents had a pet "dwarf parrot", green, named Skippy, and around the time I was 6 or 7, a couple of blue and black and white (best guess of my ancient memory) parakeets. I eventually was charged with the duties of cleaning their cages. As a birdwatcher today, I would love to figure out what they actually were, but the passage of time. ... Back then, growing up, I didn't think this was unusual, though I don't actually remember encountering caged birds at the homes of any of my friends. If I could have a conversation with my now long-departed parents, one of my questions might be -- why keep caged birds as pets? Unless I've forgotten, we did not have bird feeders outdoors, which would be, and is, my choice today. Thanks for bringing back an interesting memory.