I’ve got an ongoing concern right now with my 4 month old female canary - lately I’ve noticed that it’s shedding an above normal number of feathers.  From a brownish gray(my sister used to tease me that Roxie(yes that’s the name I gave her) looks like a “mayang-bato”) it has now turned it’s whole breast yellow, and specks of yellow feathers can be seen on its back.  Great right?  First time owners always make a big deal out of everything that happens to their birds, so pardon me if I was a little carried away. 

This post is actually more of a question to FM breeders–HOW LONG DOES A CANARY MOULT LAST?  It’s been going on for weeks now and I think Roxie continues to lose feathers badly.  No bald spots showing though, and I’m trying to provide her more protein as advised by other canary sites.

Hope you can share your experience.

I hope that this post proves less controversial than my last. Everyone on the forum has experience and knowledge that can benefit our common past-time – keeping & breeding finches. I believe that this information should be shared freely – especially with new-comers and aspirants to finch aviculture.  Without growing the past-time we have no market for birds and growth ensures public exposure and consultation with regulatory bodies like DENR.  With this in mind I modified a leaflet produced by the Northern Territory Avicultural Society which is based in Darwin, Australia.  Darwin is around the same latitude as Manila but south of the equator and as the Northern Territory is home to many of the finches kept in the Philippines and some that aren’t (chestnut-breasted manikin, Gouldian, masked, owl, painted fire-tail, pictorella manikin, shaft-tail, star, yellow- rumped manikin, zebra) I thought it would be an appropriate model. There may a similar guide here but I haven’t found it.  The modified guide is something that together we can work on to produce a useful downloadable brochure for new-comers.

The Northern Territory guide is a double sided tri-fold brochure that is given out at major events and shows by the Society to promote aviculture and the Society itself.  A number of guides have been produced covering different birds and avicultural topics.  Finchme could produce brochures/guides for canaries, weavers, individual finch species, specialist topics like food preparation or even non-finches! 

I don’t think I can load an attachment so please excuse the clumsy formatting as it has been extracted from a 3-columns/page document with embedded pictures as presented in the NT guide.  So here it is minus the pictures and with some stange formatting.  Edit away.

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Hi Everyone! I created an online Chat Room for us here at FinchMe. Leave your online schedules below and maybe we can all meet for an online EB(Eyeball). Thanks!

I don’t know if you’ve read this report already, but it says that the best male zebra singers are more intelligent and more likely to get the girls of the colony.  Apparently, the more complicated the song of the zebra, the more complicated its brain’s neuron connections are, and in the language of mutation, that’s a good thing.  It looks like the tendency of all species is to evolve into a more intelligent form, such that survival and adaptation skills become easy.

What could this mean to our hobby?  For ages, breeders have been pairing birds to produce color variations.  This is specially true for gouldians and zebras, of which we usually ignore the quality of the male’s song.  For canaries however, it is usual that the juvenile will get its song from other canaries, primarily the father.  Some canaries are therefore bred because of the duration and quality of their songs.  It is therefore easier to choose to breed better singers in canaries, as studies have proven that they are actually more intelligent than the rest. 

 Here’s an excerpt from that report:

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I’m very much aware that an All-Black Zebra Finch is very rare and hard to produce… but how much is it?  And where can I see (get) one? I got this little picture from www.finchniche.com and just wanted to know if this is an all black zebra . It says in finchniche that this one is a black face and black cheek, but is it also black breasted?

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The past week spun the most heated discussions here on FM, from the legality of birdkeeping in the country, to the creation of a price list for finches on the market.  Let me make a digression by bringing our readers’ attention to something which I believe is a more important topic–changes in the environment and what the effects are to our dear finches.  I’m practically doing a microeconomics here by taking a human situation down to the level of species of birds, but I didn’t want to post something which is totally unrelated to what we are doing here.  Besides, this is probably the most interesting article I did to date.

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After a fair bit of prompting I’ve decided to share a bit about my history with and interest in birds particularly finches. I grew up and lived all my life in Australia until I moved here in 2004 as my wife was seconded to a position in Laguna and I went on leave without pay. The avicultural world here was largely invisible to me until mid 2007 when my wife signed another 3 year contract and I had to resign from my job in Australia. Now free of my belief that I was only here temporarily I began what I started to do just before I moved here – to build an aviary and recapture the interest of my youth. As a kid in Tamworth I was always the one catching snakes, frogs, insects and growing plants and so keeping native birds came naturally. My father built my first aviary when I was 8 and on my insistence it had three sections one for finches one for parrots and one for pigeons. Finches proved to be of much more interest and were a little more affordable than the parrots and my brother took over the pigeons. Back in the 1970s the conservation ethic wasn’t so big and I used to even catch the more common ones locally on the nest (zebra, double bar [owl outside of Australia], red browed and diamond firetail). I was a naughty boy but as these birds were not rare or endangered it really wasn’t a problem and nor was my technique particularly productive. Of the finches I kept at that time I managed to breed zebras, double bars, stars and canaries but I kept others, chestnut-breasted and Pictorella manikins, printed firetails (my favourite), masked, orange breasted and St Helena waxbills and Melba finches. My main problem breeding in that aviary was that it was too crowded and that I couldn’t afford the critical mass needed for some species to be stimulated to breed or in the case of manikins they aren’t sexually dimorphic.
 
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October is unofficially FinchMe’s canary month, and as such let us get to know more about these melodious singers which are thankfully part of the finch family as well.  Before we start I would like you to take a look at this video to get more up-close and personal with the species.

(A Singing Yellow Variegated Canary)

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This may be the least popular article on Finchme but I really think that it’s important to know that legally if you keep finches (or any birds for that matter) you are supposed to register with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Legislation to control trade and preserve wildlife in Philippines is regulated and anyone holding birds native or exotic is supposed to report on their status four times a year. According to my local DENR office, any bird excluding domestic poultry but including even single pets must be registered with them however even the DENR is unlikely to ever look. I would however recommend that you keep all receipts even if you don’t register.

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Contact Information: 

 Albert Ricarte Jr.
Address: Dela Rosa St., Makati City, Philippines
Landline No.: (02)8402538
Mobile No.: +639285907068