THE BABY CANARY
A WAY back last spring, before the Ranger found the little bear, the
canaries had started a nest of five pretty eggs, and there the mother
bird had sat, keeping them warm, while her mate sang to her.
By and by the children noticed a movement under the mother bird’s wing.
Then a tiny yellow head came poking out through her feathers. When she
got off the next day to eat, they noticed a hole no bigger than a pin
head in the shell of one of the remaining eggs, then a yellow bill was
thrust through, and withdrawn again. After that there was a pecking and
a struggling inside the shell, and the next thing they knew, out came
the funniest baby they had ever seen, with pieces of the shell still
sticking to him.
Naked he was, with eyes not yet open, and a head so large for his
slender neck that he could hardly hold it up. His legs sprawled weakly
from beneath him, and his toes were so fragile that it seemed as if
they must break if he tried to stand on them.
The bird hatched the day before was the same. The next day came
another, and the day after that, another. The fifth egg did not hatch,
and the mother bird shoved it out of the nest with her foot.
My, how busy those four fledglings did keep their parents for the next
two weeks! Opening their wide mouths till one could see right down
their throats, they would just sit there in the nest all day long
eating what their parents brought them,--chopped egg and cracker, and
baby bird seed, which the big birds first cracked for them in their
own bills. It seemed as if there was no getting those young canaries
filled. Every time one got a mouthful, he would flap his pin-feathery
wings and cry “tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet,” till one wondered how so much
voice could issue from such a tiny bird.
By the time the little ones were able to stand on the roost in a row,
there were only three, for one had lost his balance as he stood on the
edge of the nest, and all the flapping of his nearly naked wings had
not served to break his fall.
Chirping their high-pitched food call, the remaining birdlings would
flap wings that just began to show a row of teeny, pale yellow feathers
along the edges.
Then a dreadful thing happened. A great brown butcher bird lived in a
thorn bush not far away. This horrid creature lived on mice and little
birds, and like the witch of the fairy tale, hung his victims on the
thorns till he was ready to eat them.
One day the children thought the canaries would like to be out of
doors, and hung the cage in a pine tree. An hour later that butcher
bird had reached in through the bars of the cage and bitten the heads
off the whole canary family save one little one. He had been in the
nest out of reach.
The little girl cried her heart out. But they decided they would do
their best to bring that fledgling up by hand. By this time he was
just about big enough to have gone to bed in a teaspoon. His wings were
fringed with pale yellow, and he would perch on a fore finger and open
his mouth for them to feed him, chirping shrilly and flapping his wings
with all his might to keep from falling off.
The boy gave him just the tiniest bits at a time on the end of a
flattened twig. Soon he was able to eat for himself. At night he had
to be snuggled into a warm nest made of an old piece of flannel, and
every day his cage was set in the sunshine and he was given a saucer of
clean, warm water to bathe in. My, how he did love to splash.
The children wondered if he were going to be a singer, like his father.
He was three months old before he really tried very hard to show them.
Then what a golden voice had that golden yellow bird! At first he had
been pale yellow, but the larger he grew, the yellower became his
plumage. They named him Caruso.
Sometimes the children would let him out of his cage in the living
room. How he loved the freedom of it! How he explored the plants
in the south window, and the silver spoons on the table! He loved
everything bright and shiny.
As he had never known what fear was (except the time the butcher bird
came), he would ride about on the children’s shoulders and eat out of
their hands.
They taught him to come when they called him, and it was a common sight
to see the children doing their lessons around the lamp of an evening
and Caruso perching on their fingers or picking at their pencil points.
Any sudden movement startled him, but until the other pets came, a more
trustful little bird you never saw. That is why, unless Ring-tail and
Fuzzy-Wuzz and Clickety-Clack were shut out of the room, he had always
had to stay in his cage.