There is a strong political coloration to the inclination to attribute inequalities of intellectual performance to nature rather than nurture . . . The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon scientists . . . for otherwise what is the point of being a scientist? The alternative is for scientists to content themselves with being the mere handymen and artisans of a machine-based culture.
P. B. MEDAWAR AND J. S. MEDAWAR, Aristotle to Zoos (1984)
Inside a tiny cage a small, blood-red bird flutters and calls. It is a pitadour: a decoy, a prisoner whose frantic attempts to escape merely draw others to the same fate. Around the decoy’s cage are a dozen sticks smeared with bird lime – the most vicious tarbaby glue you can imagine. A wild bird, lured by the decoy’s cries, comes close and alights on a limed stick. As it does so it falls to the ground, almost as though it has been shot. Lying helplessly in the grass, its feet and wings glued firmly to the stick, the bird is a picture of utter bewilderment. The trapper runs up and collects his prize, pulling away the limed twig and spitting on to the bird where patches of lime remain. Using his thumb and index finger he rolls the lime off the bird’s plumage into tiny balls, flicking them away as he walks back to his blind. The bird is a red siskin Carduelis cucullata and known locally as cardenalito – little cardinal – a tiny, vivid vermilion finch with a black face. This one is a male and a good one, its plumage the deep scarlet of oxygenated blood, and worth much more than the paler birds the man trapped earlier. He thrusts the bird into a low, flat wire box – a keeping cage – which prevents its occupants from jumping up and damaging themselves. Inside, the captives huddle together in the corner – all facing outwards with their feathers flattened, and all gasping with fear.
The man returns to his hide and almost immediately two female siskins alight on the limed twigs. He runs forward again but is irritated. Females are worthless – their plumage is grey and anaemic compared with the males’ – and dealers don’t want them. Carelessly he tears the two birds from the limed twigs. He releases them but deliberately pulls out their tail feathers as he does so and throws the birds into the vegetation, where they scuttle off like mice. The trapper believes that the females, unable to fly, will help to pull other males into the area, but in reality the flightless females are doomed and will soon be killed and eaten by predators.
The northern part of Venezuela is a region of rolling hills and scattered shrubs, with small cafetals – coffee plantations – gardens and areas for stock grazing. In the distance lies the blue haze of the Caribbean and on it the faint outline of Curaçao. It is 1925 and the trapper cannot believe his luck – everything is going so well for him. His father, and his father before him, trapped siskins and other birds here, and sold them to dealers who shipped them off to the Canary Islands, a Spanish colony, 3000 miles away. In his father’s day trapping barely paid for itself, but it was fun outwitting the birds. Today, as our man lifts the holding cage and shields his eyes against the sun to look at the morning’s catch, bird trapping is positively lucrative. This isn’t because the price of individual birds has risen but because the market now seems limitless: dealers simply cannot get enough birds and our man is an extremely skilled trapper. Years of watching and working alongside his father have paid off. He knows exactly where to place his limed twigs and precisely how they should be positioned to catch the birds without damaging them. Other trappers in the village, keen to capitalise on the booming bird market, are less adept and they capture many fewer birds, often damaging those they do catch. Our trapper’s success has made him something of a local celebrity; his trapping achievements have put money in his pockets and several señoritas have given him the eye in the hope that they might eventually get their hands in his pockets.1
Later in the day the birds are collected by a dealer who drives them down to the coast. There they join dozens of other increasingly stressed individuals crammed together into cages without food or water. Towards dusk, as the temperature falls, a man comes by and pours a bucketful of seed through the tops of the cages, and attaches a small drinking pot to the wire front of each cage. As he walks away the birds crowd forward to suck desperately at the water. But already some of the birds are dead, and lie rusty red among the filth and feathers on the floors of cages. After dark the birds are placed in the hold of a ship, along with cages of parrots, finches and a variety of monkeys, to begin their journey to the Canary Islands and for some of them, ultimately, to Germany.
Six weeks later in the leafy suburbs of Bremen, one of Germany’s two main ports, Hans Duncker, high-school teacher and canary enthusiast, eagerly awaited the six red siskins he had ordered. Like many of his countrymen Duncker was passionate about birds. He was interested in everything and anything to do with them, and having written a prize-winning book on birds twenty years earlier, he has a well-deserved reputation as a scientific ornithologist. Duncker’s life was changed after World War I by his chance meeting with champion canary breeder Karl Reich. Together they hatched a plan to create a red canary by appropriating the genes from a red siskin and putting them inside an ordinary canary.
Reich telephoned to tell Duncker that the ship bearing the siskins had arrived and he set off for the port to collect them. Of the original 700 birds which left Venezuela over 600 had died en route, most of them within a few days of capture. The Bremen bird dealer, keen to dispose of the survivors as quickly as possible, caught six individuals with his bare hands and placed them in the small cage Reich had taken with him. Starting for home, past the coffee and tea importers’ elegant warehouses lining the east bank of the Weser river, Reich was eager to release the birds into their new home. They weren’t cheap, but if their plans came to fruition, these little red birds would more than pay for themselves. Reich arrived at his home on the edge of the old town where Duncker was waiting for him and together they went into his bird room to release the captives into a big cage. Only five siskins flew out. The sixth lay dead, like a blood smear on the bottom of the box. The trauma of the dealer’s hands had been the final insult. Reich mentally shrugged; like all bird keepers he knew that mortality was high among new acquisitions; it was survival of the fittest and the sight of dead birds was something you got used to.
Startled by the new sense of space, the survivors flew frantically back and forth inside the cage. After a few moments they stopped and, breathing hard, clung to wire to look nervously at their new owners. Reich and Duncker peered back at them. All the birds were males, but four of them had dull red plumage with badly soiled feathers. But the fifth bird, against all the odds, was immaculate. Somehow, through weeks of travel in cramped and crappy quarters, this one individual had managed to keep itself in perfect plumage. This is what Duncker and Reich had waited for. Their genetic experiments could now begin in earnest.
The Venezuelan trapper who removed the red siskins from their native forests for Duncker and Reich was one of thousands across the globe who caught birds for the booming European markets. Across Africa, India and South America bird catchers supplied an insatiable appetite for small birds, fuelling a forced migration of feathered bodies into European cities. The practice of keeping small birds in cages was an ancient one, dating back almost to the beginning of civilisation, reaching a peak during the late 1800s.2 By the 1920s, when the possibility of creating a red canary first ignited Duncker’s imagination, cage birds were still popular and virtually ubiquitous across much of Europe.
Germany was the stronghold of European bird keeping and had been so for centuries. It was here, 400 years earlier, that ingenious and dedicated bird enthusiasts had first started to create a yellow canary, and the German tradition of genetic tinkering had continued ever since. Attitudes towards keeping and breeding birds, however, had changed and nowhere more so than in Britain. The British were still very keen on cage birds in the 1920s, but the hobby was less popular than it had once been. People still kept canaries, parrots, foreign finches and more recently grass parakeets, also known as budgerigars, but the habit of keeping birds, and native species in particular, was in retreat. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century when a small group of wealthy women started to question the ethics of keeping little birds – especially those from their own country – the catching and caging of birds had been under threat. These women campaigners were typical bourgeois products of the colonial age: less concerned with the welfare of foreign birds, they were adamant that keeping native species in cages was wholly inappropriate. Thus started in England what would later become the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the slow but sure decline in British bird keeping. So successful was the RSPB’s anti-bird-keeping campaign that today bird keeping is a mere shadow of its former self and, in all but a few sectors of society, viewed with great suspicion. It is worse than that. In Britain keeping native species is now considered a disreputable hobby and admitting to being a bird keeper is like confessing a crime. In Germany things could not be more different. Keeping birds is still a respectable pastime and aviculture has retained its respectability. Professional bird researchers there recognised a long time ago, and continue to recognise, that the accumulated knowledge of generations of bird keepers might actually be useful, not just for ornithologists but for science in general.
Science and amateur bird keeping are parallel cultures and, like lines that are almost parallel, they rarely meet, but when they do, as Hans Duncker later discovered, extraordinary things can happen. My own quest for the red canary took me across Europe, from the cradle of canary culture in Germany’s deep south, to Bremen in the north, where Duncker spent his working life. I oscillated between the poorly lit basements of university libraries and the beautiful homes of private collectors who lust over rare bird books, to some seedy pubs and the more modest homes of bird keepers themselves. Entering the world of the fanatical bird keeper – those who enjoy mating different species together and those who bask in the reflected glory of their beautiful red canaries – made me feel a bit like Charles Darwin, who in the 1850s joined various pigeon clubs and sat among ardent fanciers in London’s gin palaces in order to see what it was all about. We know only a little about Darwin’s meetings with pigeon-fanciers, but I hope his first encounter was better than mine.
Soon after deciding to write this book, I was asked if I would talk to a bird breeders club in northern England. Their meetings, it turned out, were held in a public house in one of Yorkshire’s less attractive cities. It was dark and raining as I arrived on the appointed evening, acutely aware that this was an area where I wouldn’t normally consider getting out of my car, let alone going inside a pub. But I did, and carrying my projector and screen I felt a bit like a conjuror turning up at a children’s party. My reception was distinctly frosty and I began to wonder why I had bothered. Standing beside the projector, I waited to be introduced, much as I would at a scientific meeting, when, with more than a touch of impatience, someone shouted from across the room, ‘Well, go on, then!’
The body language of the audience was hardly encouraging: to a man they were leaning back in their chairs, as far away from me as they could get. Years of recalcitrant undergraduate audiences were nothing compared with this, but I carried on and told them about my research – how sperm meets egg and how they might breed better birds. And slowly I sensed their resistance melting away. Some of them even started to lean forward in their seats. After forty minutes there was a break and they all trooped downstairs to refill their glasses; meanwhile the barman appeared with an enormous plate of sandwiches and pork pies. ‘Tuck in, lad,’ someone said, so I did and I noticed that someone had bought me a pint. Fifteen minutes later, after everyone had refuelled and peed, we were off again. Somehow the atmosphere seemed different. By the end of the talk there was no question: they had enjoyed it and the discussion continued unabated for nearly an hour. I felt almost euphoric. The contrast with the situation a few hours earlier was unbelievable. And just as I was about to leave, someone asked me if I would give the same talk to the lads at his club. A few weeks later I did just that and, to my utter amazement, almost everyone who had been at the first meeting was there as well as many new faces. Hans Duncker – dedicated to bridging the gap between professional biologists and bird keepers – would have been proud of me.
My distinctly chilly reception at this, my first, bird keepers’ meeting was, I later realised, something I should have anticipated. British bird keepers live in fear of the law and are suspicious of anyone from the outside. The bird protection bodies have done an outstanding job in persuading people – mainly middle-class people – that keeping birds, mainly by working-class people, is socially unacceptable.3 In Darwin’s day, keeping pigeons or canaries was both respectable and classless. And the same was true in Duncker’s Germany.
Duncker knew it and Darwin knew it, but few others before or since have appreciated the scientific potential of the vast store of untapped knowledge hidden away in the collective memory of bird keepers. The long history of bird keeping, stretching back in time, was the crucial strand of knowledge on which Duncker’s and Reich’s success would ultimately rest.
A bird keeper since boyhood, Reich was the repository of that knowledge. Through his writing, recordings and public performances he had already passed on some of that information to a new generation of bird keepers. While this helped to maintain the avicultural tradition, on its own it was rather like cloning or asexual reproduction: it simply generated more of the same but nothing novel. The combination of Reich’s knowledge and Duncker’s imagination, on the other hand, was loaded with potential from the very beginning. Reich was the cultural transmitter of bird-keeping know-how, enabling Hans Duncker to meld it with his own specialist understanding of heredity. Their respective sets of knowledge were like chromosomes from different parents coming together during fertilisation, crossing over and recombining to provide a combination of talent novel enough to change the world.