The Germans pay more attention to the song of these birds [Canaries] than any other class of breeders, teaching them, when young the notes of the nightingale and titlark; thereby adding much pleasing harmony to the song of their birds.
THOMAS ANDREWES, The Bird Keeper’s Guide and Companion (1830)
From the dawn of civilisation people have kept birds for their song. ‘Singing birds are so pleasant a part of the creation . . . they were undoubtedly designed by the Great Author of Nature on purpose to entertain and delight mankind,’ wrote Eleazer Albin in 1737. People trapped and caged anything that sang: larks, thrushes, wrens, warblers, goldcrests, robins, buntings and finches. In the 1300s Italian gardens were festooned with caged songbirds to create an auditory illusion of heaven. Singing birds were the medieval radio and having a songbird in the house or garden was rather like having piped music. Songbird enthusiasts were more discerning than those who promulgate piped music, however, for they carefully selected birds according to their vocal prowess and from the earliest times (until the canary ousted it) the nightingale was the favourite with its luscious, heart-stopping song.1
Writers and poets have endlessly extolled the nightingale’s vocal virtues, including the great German cage bird authority, Johann Bechstein. In 1795 he wrote, ‘The bystander is astonished to hear a song, which is so sonorous as to make his ears tingle . . .’ and the French natural history writer George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon wrote in the 1750s, ‘The name of the Nightingale recalls to the memory of every man who has not lost the capacity of simple and natural enjoyment, the remembrance of some beautiful spring night, when the sky was clear, the air tranquil, and nature lay in expectant silence, as he listened enraptured to the songstress of the grove.’
Even the English loved nightingales and the seventeenth-century writer Isaak Walton declared that the bird ‘breathes such sweet lowd music out of her instrumental throat that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased’. Many writers other than Buffon and Walton erroneously assumed that it was the female bird that sang, a myth perpetuated by Oscar Wilde in his children’s story The Nightingale and the Rose.
The nightingale was all too easily deprived of its liberty, as a midnineteenth-century London bird trapper recalled, ‘[It] is a beautiful song bird; they’re plucky birds too and answer to anybody when taken in April they are plucked [plucky] enough to sing in a cage. I can ketch a nightingale in less than five minutes: as soon as he calls I calls to him with my mouth and he’ll answer me (both by night and by day) – I set my traps and catch ’em almost before I’ve tried my luck and I’ve ketched sometimes 30 in a day.’2
Nightingales were so popular they motivated generations of bird enthusiasts to devise ways of keeping them in good health and breeding them in captivity. The definitive guide was a French monograph, Aedologie, ou Traite du Rossignol Franc, ou Chanteur by Louis Daniel Arnault de Nobleville, published in 1751, which recommended tying the wings of newly caught birds so they couldn’t batter themselves in their confined quarters. It also advised nurturing nightingales on raw heart (with the ‘strings’ removed) and ants’ eggs (pupa), but even with all this attention, the death rate of newly caught birds was high. Those that survived the first weeks of incarceration, however, could live for several years and in the care of a handful of experts – mainly German – they could even be persuaded to breed.3
There’s a contemporary joke which claims that in heaven all the policemen are English, the car mechanics are German, the cooks are French, the hotel keepers are Swiss and the lovers are Italian. But in hell the policemen are German, the car mechanics French, the cooks English, the hotel keepers Italian and the lovers Swiss. These national stereotypes are centuries old. The European aristocracy cared very much about their cage birds and were almost certainly telling jokes about their different attitudes to keeping them. From the sixteenth century onwards the Italians, French and English were renowned for their hedonistic obsession with cage birds, but were too idle to breed their own. The main interest the Swiss had in birds concerned the artificial ones that appeared from the inside of wooden clocks with impeccable if monotonous regularity. The Germans, on the other hand, were industrious and highly organised in trying to get their birds to breed in captivity, and they studied their charges with academic alacrity.
One of the most remarkable of these was the sixteenth-century German nobleman Freiherr Johann Ferdinand Adam von Pernau, Lord of Rosenau, and if the Karolinska judges ever decide to award Nobel Prizes to the long dead, they should give one to him. Pernau’s methods of studying both wild and captive birds were remarkable and anticipated the Nobel laureate and animal behaviourist Konrad Lorenz by almost 400 years.4 Virtually unknown during his lifetime and for centuries afterwards, Pernau was rediscovered and acclaimed by the great German ornithologist Erwin Stresemann only in 1925. This belated recognition occurred because, not wanting to ‘hunt after honours’, he had chosen to write anonymously, presenting himself merely as ‘a fancier contemplating the creatures made by God’. His passion for birds arose, he said, as an antidote to the moral depravity of his time – gambling, shameful gluttony and what he euphemistically but accurately referred to as ‘pleasure’. Pernau was unique in observing birds rather than eating them and his aim was to ‘show how greatly Man can delight in these lovely creatures of God without killing them’. He was also aware of the importance of making his own observations and keeping his discoveries distinct from what was known already. It was this individualistic approach that put Pernau ahead of his time.
He was among the first to appreciate that birds acquire their songs by learning, noting that if a young bird was brought up in isolation, unable to hear others, it ‘never will attain its natural song completely, but will sing rather poorly’. But if instead of being reared alone, a young bird was brought up hearing only the song of a different species, it would learn that song. ‘A finch’, he wrote, ‘will learn to imitate some of the Nightingale’s strophes . . .’ Pernau noticed as well that birds differed in their need to hear others singing. It was essential, for example, that a young chaffinch hear its own kind if it was to sing properly as an adult, but it was a waste of time using another species as a tutor since chaffinches could learn nothing but chaffinch song. At the other extreme, the simple song of the North American Alder and Willow Flycatchers, for example, is ‘hard-wired’ and young birds brought up in auditory isolation can sing just as well (or as badly) as any wild flycatcher. The canary, Pernau noted, lay at the chaffinch end of the spectrum, but with the remarkable capacity to transform virtually any sound, including a nightingale’s song, into a melody.
Seventy years later and apparently unaware of Pernau’s work, the Honourable Daines Barrington, an English lawyer, Fellow of the Royal Society and friend of Gilbert White, published in 1773 what he thought was the first scientific analysis of birdsong.5 A wealthy dilettante whose intellectual pursuits straddled art and science, Barrington was keen to make sense of the natural world and felt that the best way of doing so was through the power of reason and the careful organisation of information. It was he who provided Gilbert White with a set of printed forms on which to tabulate his daily weather records, allowing White to link them to natural events such as the appearance of the first spring swallow or the call of the first cuckoo. The end result was White’s The Natural History of Selbourne.
Of the many intellectual exercises Barrington carried out, his assessment of the quality of birdsong was among the best. He loved music and had previously evaluated the eleven-year-old Mozart when he visited England with his father in 1765. Barrington’s genius with birdsong was to modify a method of assessment originally devised by the French art connoisseur Roger de Piles to compare the relative merits of colourists like Rubens with design enthusiasts like Poussin. The technique involved ranking paintings according to a number of criteria that Piles had dreamed up as he languished in a Dutch prison during the 1690s after being convicted of spying. Standing on Piles’s shoulders, Barrington identified five criteria by which birdsong could be ranked and then, using a set of forms, set about scoring the vocalisations of seventeen commonly kept songbirds. Each was awarded a score out of twenty for: (i) mellowness of tone, (ii) sprightly notes, (iii) plaintive notes, (iv) compass (by which he meant overall range) and (v) execution. The nightingale, of course, came out on top, attaining 19 points for all qualities except ‘sprightly notes’, for which Barrington gave it only 14. ‘I make 20 the point of absolute perfection,’ he wrote, as reluctant as any schoolteacher to give his or her pupils full marks. Of 100 possible points, the nightingale got 90. Next in line was the linnet, scoring 74, then the skylark with 63 (faring badly on mellowness and plaintive notes). The reed bunting was at the bottom of the class with just 8 points. Barrington recognised that his system was subjective. ‘I shall not be surprised’, he said, ‘if . . . many may disagree with me about particular birds.’ This is exactly what happened.
Fifty years later Patrick Syme, a Scottish bird keeper and artist, was clearly irritated both by Barrington’s scores and by his failure to define exactly what he meant by terms like ‘mellowness’ and ‘sprightliness’. So Syme rescored all the birds in Barrington’s original list as well as some others such as the canary,6 pointing out those cases where he and Barrington disagreed and taking great care to be very clear about what he meant by ‘mellowness’ and ‘sprightliness’. One of the birds on which they disagreed was the bullfinch, whose song Syme considered ‘very sweet . . . soft and melodius’. But Syme was out on a limb here: Barrington hadn’t even included the bullfinch in his list, because like virtually everyone else he felt that its song ‘without instruction, is a most jarring and disagreeable noise’. While Barrington and Syme disagreed over a few species, in most cases their scores were fairly consistent.
For some reason Barrington hadn’t scored the canary, but Syme gave it 67 out of 100, placing it second after the nightingale in his scheme (the linnet got only 56). Few English bird keepers at that time would have taken issue with this ranking, but had this exercise taken place in Germany, the canary would probably have received a much higher score and might even have jostled the nightingale for first place. The entire focus of canary breeding in Germany was on song, whereas in Britain song was secondary to posture, ‘type’ and overall appearance. For over 200 years through a combination of selective breeding and intensive training German bird breeders so modified and improved the bird’s song that by the late 1700s some canaries were said to sing as sweetly as any nightingale.7
Despite the nightingale’s superiority as a singer, it had several failings. These shortcomings were eloquently outlined in the early 1700s by Monsieur Hervieux who, although he had a vested interest in promoting the canary, was startlingly honest in his assessment of nightingales.8 They were difficult to keep, he said, and needed a special diet that required ‘much Application’. ‘Besides, the Nightingale, after all the pains taken in feeding and rearing sings but one short Season of the Year’. Nightingales died all too readily in captivity partly because every autumn they went through several weeks of hormonal hell. Battering themselves against the bars of their cage, they acted out their entire migratory journey in the frantic but futile motions that German researchers refer to as Zungunruhe.
Canaries, on the other hand, were much more robust. They didn’t migrate, they were more easily maintained and bred in captivity, and they would sing throughout the year. Paradoxically, perhaps the canary’s greatest asset was that its song was not perfect yet could be made so with the right training, an activity that provided a challenge for the trainer and the bird itself. Of the thousands of bird-fanciers who tried to coerce canaries into singing the nightingale’s song, Karl Reich was the only one to produce an entire strain of birds that could do so.
On hearing Reich’s nightingale-canary for the first time in 1921, Hans Duncker was inspired to spend the next fifteen years of his life studying canaries. To understand why he did so, we must go back in time to when they were first discovered.
It is said that when Sir Walter Raleigh returned from his travels in the 1580s, one of the first things he did was to present Queen Elizabeth I with a cageful of wild canaries. She was singularly unimpressed. Far from being bright yellow, the canary was then an insignificant dull green little bird. Sir Walter begged her not to judge the birds by their appearance but to wait until she had heard them sing.
When they performed in due course, she was overwhelmed by the vigour and variety of the birds’ voices – a song to challenge the nightingale’s in quality and compass.9
In fact, on hearing a canary sing for the first time, almost everyone was astonished by it. Conrad Gessner,10 a Swiss naturalist and polymath whose animal encyclopaedia was published during Elizabeth’s reign, described the canary’s song thus:
It hath a very sweet and shrill note, which at one breath continued for a very long time without intermission, it can draw out sometimes in length, sometimes raise very high, by a various and almost musical inflexion of its voice, making very pleasant and artificial melody. The sound it makes is very sharp, and so quavering, that sometimes when it stretches and exercises its little throat and Chaps [mandibles/jaws], whistling with all its force, it vehemently strikes, and even deafens the Ears of the hearers with its shrillness. Many are delighted by this kind of singing, many also are offended, saying, that they are astonied [astounded or disconcerted] and deafned by it.
Why do canaries sing so loudly? We don’t know for sure. But stuck out in the Atlantic, the Canary Islands are extremely windy, dissipating sound like pollen from grass, and so it is possible that they sing louder than just about any other small bird, simply in order to be heard. Remarkably, some of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands, on La Gomera in particular, also communicate by whistling. Silbo Gomera is a whistled version of spoken Spanish, and is used not because of the wind, but as an efficient means of communicating across the vast ravines and gullies that intersect the island. This whistling language once allowed the indigenous people to communicate among themselves without divulging any secrets to their unwelcome Spanish masters.
Canaries reached central Europe via Spain and Italy in the 1400s and on a continent of bird keepers their remarkable song immediately captured people’s attention. The Italian nobility were completely infatuated and imported them in hundreds. But the Germans were among the first to devise clever ways of propagating them in captivity. Despite centuries of bird keeping, there had never been any need to breed birds in captivity because they were readily available in the wild. But canaries were so esteemed, so expensive and so difficult to acquire that there was a tremendous incentive to create a self-perpetuating, captive population. This was not a simple undertaking. Canaries were not common pigeons or fowl, but more like feathered orchids demanding extraordinary care and skill. The closest that previous generations of bird-fanciers had come to propagating their own birds was rearing young ones taken from nests in the wild. Once wild-caught canaries started to lay eggs in captivity the temptation was to rear their babies by hand. Undoubtedly this was tried but it failed because, rather like captive chimpanzees brought up by humans, hand-reared birds rarely reproduce properly as adults. During the rearing process they become sexually fixated on their owner rather than their own species. The Germans succeeded by giving their wild-caught canaries lots of space, usually a large room planted with small trees, re-creating as far as was possible a microcosm of their natural environment. By the mid-1600s the German fanciers were exporting canaries across Europe in such large numbers that they became known as German-birds.11
The obsession with canaries and other singing birds at this time provided great opportunities for anyone who could increase the quality or quantity of song produced by a captive bird. Early bird breeders recognised that canaries and other songbirds, such as linnets and chaffinches, did not hatch with their songs already embedded in their brains, but learned them from older birds. In captivity young birds could be taught either by their own species or a different one, by a human whistling or even by a musical instrument. The importance of learning in the canary’s acquisition of song was beautifully, if accidentally, demonstrated when one particular bird in the 1700s incorporated the sound of distant church bells into its repertoire. Another, owned by a tax collector, included an unusual ‘clink’ in its song which turned out to be the ‘telling of crowns’.12
German-birds were soon considered far superior singers to those taken from the wild and were very much in demand. As Barrington wrote, ‘Most of those Canary-birds, which are imported from the Tyrol [then part of Germany] have been educated by parents, the progenitor of which was instructed by a nightingale; our English Canary-birds have commonly more of the tit-lark note. . . . The traffick in these birds makes a small article of commerce, as four Tyroleze generally bring over to England sixteen hundred every year; and though they carry them on their backs one thousand miles, as well as pay £20 duty for such a number, yet upon the whole it answers to sell these birds at 5d, a piece.’ Barrington probably didn’t know what these canary traders went through to safeguard their cargo. The main worry was disease, which could spread like wildfire through a trader’s entire stock.13 To minimise the risks of infection, every few days the canary salesmen checked into an inn, hiring a number of rooms in which they released their entire stock of several thousand birds while they scrubbed out their cages. Once the cages were clean and dry, the birds were recaptured and replaced, and the trader moved on, presumably leaving somebody else to clean out the rooms.
By the time Barrington was writing about birdsong, the centre of canary breeding had shifted north from the Tyrol to Nuremberg and Augsburg, and these two towns dominated the business for the next century. It shifted again in the early 1800s when miners from the Imst Valley brought canaries north to the tiny mining town of St Andreasberg in the Harz Mountains, midway between Berlin and Frankfurt. Mining towns in this region had a long tradition of keeping songbirds, especially chaffinches, which were trained to sing for competitions. It is not difficult to imagine the enthusiasm with which they greeted the much more malleable canary and St Andreasberg quickly became the heart of canary breeding in Germany.
In the early 1920s, when Reich and Duncker were planning their first experiments, St Andreasberg was the main organ pumping roller canaries around the entire world. Almost everyone in the village, man, woman and child, was employed in some aspect of this remarkable business – but only in their spare time, for the main employment here was mining. Tucked away on the western edge of the Harz, the village of St Andreasberg grew up around the Samson silver mine, which first opened in 1521.14 Conditions underground were appalling and the miner’s life a harsh one – very few reached old age. The main lode was a kilometre below ground and the workers descended to it on an ingenious ‘man-engine’ comprising two adjacent vertical rods pumped alternately up and down. This enabled a man to descend (and ascend) fairly effortlessly, by stepping first to one side and then to the other – albeit for a full forty-five minutes. Once they got to the main vein it was hellish: 40ºC and 100 per cent humidity. The air was often gaspingly poor in oxygen or fatally rich in carbon monoxide, particularly at the ends of the long galleries. Generations of miners had protected themselves from bad air underground by taking small birds with them. Mice had been tried, but they proved far too robust, a fact confirmed by experiments conducted in the early 1900s which showed that mice could tolerate nearly a hundred times as much carbon monoxide as a canary before showing any warning signs. Small birds were supremely sensitive to poisonous gas and the canary provided the added benefit of its voice, which must have sounded eerily reassuring as it reverberated around the ghostly galleries.
Following its inception in the early 1800s, the St Andreasberg canary business expanded rapidly and by the 1820s was producing about 4000 songsters each year. Other Harz villages were also busy rearing birds, but the tipping point came in 1836 when a survey declared St Andreasberg canaries the best songsters in Germany. In the canary mania that followed, across Europe and as far away as Russia and the United States, people wanted the genuine article – a Harzer roller. A combination of genetic good fortune and skilful training had generated a bird with a distinctive and attractive song, and breeders could get as much as 100DM for a good singer. By 1882 three-quarters of the 800 families in St Andreasberg were rearing canaries and in some years the town exported as many as 12,000 male birds. The Harz region as a whole exported a phenomenal 150,000 males annually, providing a good living for a few enterprising bird dealers.
This remarkable business also generated subsidiary jobs such as cage making. Every bird that left the Harz did so in its own individual cage, put together by families working together during the long winter evenings. Children were a crucial part of this cottage industry, their small fingers being particularly adept at fitting the tiny wooden pieces together. And the cages themselves were tiny, allowing the bird only just enough room to turn. In design they were essentially the same as those used by the Tyrolese traders who had lugged canaries across Europe on their backs two centuries earlier. The cage parts – slats and dowels – were provided by the sawmill on the edge of town. Families assembled them, returned them as completed cages and were paid just two pfennigs per cage for their efforts. The other subsidiary job was making the diminutive white ceramic pots that went into every cage to hold the canary’s drinking water.
The Harzer or roller canary’s reputation rested on its song, so called because it resembled a deep, hollow ‘roll’ – a repetitive ‘rorororo’ which sounded as though it was sung from deep inside a barrel.15 Totally unlike the warbling, whistling wild canary, the roller’s song is pitched much lower, highly repetitive and, to my ear at least, far from melodic (Figure 1).
On the other hand, the roller’s song is relatively loud and curiously sustained, and perhaps it was the novelty of the sound that people found captivating. Despite its monumental success, not all canary enthusiasts were equally enamoured of the roller, and during the early 1700s a breakaway group of enthusiasts from the town of Malines (Mechelen) just south of Antwerp produced a more melodic version known as the ‘water slager’ or Malinois. ‘Water slager’ means ‘water-beater’ and these birds were so named because the main feature of their song is a tongue-clicking ‘klok’, like a large drop of liquid falling into a barrel of water. The song also contains other bubbling sounds, and is generally much more varied and exuberant than the roller’s restricted repertoire.16
FIGURE 1 Sound sonograms of the songs of a wild canary (upper) and a roller canary, showing the clear difference in the melodic complexity of their songs (from Güttinger, 1985).
Canaries require several weeks of training before they are proficient singers and it was usually winter before the young rollers were ready for sale. Hundreds of cages, each containing a single bird, were loaded on to horse-drawn wagons in the villages and driven to Göttingen. They were then placed on the train for Bremen, where they were put on the Southampton steamers and sent across the sea to New York. The American lust for canaries seemed insatiable and in the first four decades of the twentieth century, before World War II interrupted the trade, the USA imported over 10 million of them.
The boom in Harzer canaries lasted from the 1870s until about 1910. Its demise is said to have occurred for exactly the same reason as the decline in whales, cod and seahorses – greed. During the period of maximum demand the competition between dealers became so intense that, desperate not to miss the boat, some of them foolishly sold birds before their training was complete and these inevitably poor singers killed the market. Without doubt other factors also contributed to the canary’s decline, including a glutted market and changing fashions in birds and other commodities.17
Karl Reich was well known among Germany’s canary cognoscenti for his recordings of birdsong and for his nightingale-canaries. But Duncker knew virtually nothing about him and when he knocked on Reich’s door that summer afternoon he could have had little idea how their meeting would shape the rest of his life.
Four years Duncker’s junior, Reich ran a family hardware business on Fedelhörenstrasse. Tall, slim and with eyes that twinkled behind his spectacles, Karl Reich was the archetypal shopkeeper, radiating enthusiasm for both his work and his hobby. Duncker went to Reich’s home on Am Wall, a street in the city’s original fortifications, now overlooking the Wallanlagen park separating the old and new Bremen.18 There is no record of exactly what happened during that initial meeting, but based on my own experiences with bird keepers, and the way Reich’s and Duncker’s friendship blossomed, this is what I imagine took place.
Welcomed by a smiling Frau Reich, Duncker was ushered through into her husband’s bird room. This was Reich’s den, his potting shed, his private sanctum where he could devote himself to his birds. After the two men greeted each other and shook hands, Duncker must have needed a moment or two to take it all in. On one wall was a massive collection of rosettes, cups and canary-motif vases signifying Reich’s success. On the other walls were row upon row of elegant wooden cages, each with a pair of solid doors, most of which were firmly shut, but nonetheless containing birds. The cages matched the dark, polished wooden furniture in the room, each cage bearing on its door a golden marquetry canary emblem. Then there was the warm and rather pleasant scent of the birds and their aromatic seed diet – a smell that undoubtedly reminded Hans of his childhood days when he’d visited his neighbours’ bird rooms. There was also the sight and sound of the birds themselves. No sooner had Reich opened the doors of a particular cage than the occupant burst into song. This was no ordinary song, but an enchanting, sonorous, reverberating, rolling chorus, so powerful that Duncker could feel it in his chest. Reich loved the effect his birds had on people. As he opened the doors of cage after cage the birds’ song built up to a crescendo – a veritable orgy of sound.
After five minutes Reich started to close the cage doors one by one, silencing the birds in turn. The first part of the performance was over and as he closed the last door the silence was uncanny. Reich waited until the sound of the singing had ceased ringing in their ears and then without speaking cast a glance at Duncker, as if to say ‘Now listen to this’ and opened the doors of another cage. Inside was a single green bird which immediately began to sing, remarkably, Duncker noticed, with its beak firmly closed. The sound that the bird uttered was not a typical roller canary song but the gorgeous, liquid notes of a nightingale. Duncker was transfixed, realising immediately that this was the song he had heard in the street the week before. The little bird held its body rigid at a low angle on the perch and literally shook with the effort of its powerful song. Duncker was visibly moved and, closing his eyes, allowed himself to be transported back for a moment or two to the Ballenstedt woods and the wild nightingales of his childhood. Reich beamed, for this was exactly the way he liked to see people react to his birds. He was even happier when Duncker told him the story of the mysterious ‘nightingale’ he had heard in town.
Almost as if she knew the routine by heart, once the nightingale performance was over Frau Reich came in and left a jug of beer and two glasses on the table. Reich told Duncker the story of how he had created his extraordinary birds. It started when, as a small boy, he had been given a canary as a Christmas gift. He loved canaries and revelled in their rich baritone voices, but he didn’t much like the modern Harz Mountain rollers with their relentlessly repetitive songs. Instead, he longed for something more satisfying and in 1909 set about trying to find the best song tutor for his canaries. He tested no fewer than twenty-five different bird species from around the world, before deciding, like Pernau and Barrington before him, that he could do no better than the local nightingale. Then, in 1911, when he was twenty-six, he produced a canary with a voice of truly outstanding quality, even by roller standards. This bird, which he named Bär (Bear), changed his life. He had a voice so deep and so pure, Reich said, that it reminded him of the rich, liquid tones uttered by nightingales and inspired him to try to create an entire strain of birds that would sing like this. It was too late for Bear, who sang a typical canary song, but Reich knew that with the right training Bear’s offspring might be induced to sing the ultimate tune. The following year he mated Bear back to his mother, then placed their offspring, at the tender age of three weeks, under the care of their ‘schoolmaster’, a vigorously singing nightingale. It started off well, but no sooner had the young canaries started to warble their first liquid notes than the tutor stopped singing. The canary’s breeding season, which began in May, coincided with the end of the nightingale’s singing season. Bear’s male babies eventually uttered a smattering of nightingale strophes interspersed with typical canary phrases – hardly a success, but a result sufficiently tantalising to spur Reich on to finding a solution to the nightingale problem. He would have to shift the nightingale’s singing season so that it encompassed the young canaries’ learning window. This meant getting nightingales to continue pouring out their wonderful song long into June and July – months after they would normally have stopped singing. Remarkably, Reich told Duncker, he was able to do just that by modifying the nightingales’ diet and the temperature at which they were kept so that they moulted and came into breeding condition later than normal.19
I admit that I was incredulous when I first read of Reich’s claim, in an old interview, that he could alter the timing of his nightingales’ song in this way. A bird’s singing season is deeply entrained and generations of bird keepers have succeeded in changing the timing of birds’ moult and singing season only by altering the amount of light they received. Reducing the light a bird received in May – ‘stopping’, they called it – fooled it into thinking the season further advanced than it really was. This meant they moulted sooner and instead of starting to sing in spring, they were going full belt by September or October.20 When asked, Reich told everyone including Hans Duncker that he had discovered the temperature-and-diet trick from a very old anonymously written German book with a long-winded title: Unterricht von den verschiedenen Arten der Kanarievögel und der Nachtigallen, wie diese beyderley Vögel aufzuziehen und mit Nutzen so zu paaren seien, dass man schöne Zunge von ihnen haben kann (Lessons about the different species of canaries and nightingales, how these two birds should be bred and usefully mated to produce a nice tongue [sic] from them). The book certainly existed (it was published in 1772) and it is very rare, but on tracking it down I found no mention of any technique other than ‘stopping’ to alter the birds’ singing season. Reich had been deliberately deceptive, as indeed had the anonymous author of his ancient book for the crucial chapter on training nightingales to sing throughout the year was lifted word for word, with no credit, from the book by Arnault de Nobleville – the French authority on nightingales – published twenty years earlier. It is incredible that no one bothered to check what these early authors had said and that no one rumbled Reich’s secret. But they didn’t, presumably because these books were as rare then as they are now and resided only in the hands of a few avicultural bibliophiles.
Reich prided himself on being able to produce singing nightingales at almost any time of year, but apart from the temperature-and-diet story, he was always evasive about the methods behind his success. He later claimed that he refused to reveal his secret because he didn’t want everyone rushing out to catch wild nightingales, but the fact was that, just as with his hardware business, he didn’t want any competition, for his nightingale-canaries were unique and justifiably famous.
With a succession of nightingale ‘schoolmasters’ for his young canaries, Reich selected and perpetuated his precious stock with all the skill of a master breeder. Both Reich and his birds excelled. One of his stud males – a descendant of Bear – was paired a staggering thirty times in one season, and produced no fewer than seventy-two offspring. The bird paid the ultimate price for his lifestyle and died soon after the season ended. He was duly stuffed for posterity as were all the birds in the Bear dynasty. Still, Reich’s management skills were such that he could produce as many as 350 young birds in a season. Every male he used was one of Bear’s descendants and they all bore his vocal qualities; the females were Bear’s relatives too – rather more distant – the song was in the birds’ blood. Within a few years Reich was able to dispense with the nightingale tutors altogether, for his young canaries now acquired their unique song entirely on their own. Others, like Baron von Pernau and Arnault de Nobleville, had produced one-off nightingale-canaries, but no one had ever created a self-perpetuating strain of them.
Since 1910, Reich told Duncker, he had made phonograph recordings of his birds on shellac discs and sent them to friends. Reich was the pioneering maestro of birdsong recordings, training his birds to sing to order in front of the cumbersome recording equipment – no mean feat and absolutely essential in those days before editing. He must have had a truly magical touch, for he persuaded one particular nightingale to perch and sing right inside the horn of the recording machine, thereby ensuring spectacularly clear recordings. Reich even used his records of nightingale songs to train his canaries – the first time this had ever been done and the first evidence that sound alone was sufficient for a bird to learn a song. In 1910, just three weeks after he made his first phonograph record, he was invited to describe his pioneering techniques and play his nightingale recordings at an international bird conference in Berlin. In the darkened auditorium the audience listened with rapt attention to this dual miracle of modern technology and evolution.21 His gramophone records made him famous and for the next twenty years Reich continued to make recordings of birdsong, which were sold across Europe, Russia and in the United States. Although they made money, Reich said it was the kudos he enjoyed most.
Duncker left Reich’s home with a million ideas racing through his head. As the weeks went by those ideas wouldn’t go away and he became increasingly intrigued by what he had seen and heard. As well as exciting scientific interest, the nightingale-canaries provided a welcome distraction from the degenerating political and economic situation in which Germany found itself following the Great War. The Allies’ peace terms and voracious reparation programmes were driving the country into turmoil. By the early 1920s rocketing inflation, mass unemployment, malnutrition and terrorism had generated an atmosphere of despondency bordering on desperation among the German people, especially the middle classes. Perhaps Duncker latched on to Reich’s canaries as someone in a shipwreck latches on to a piece of flotsam. In any case Reich’s account left Duncker keen to place these special birds in the overall context of song-canary culture. After much reading and hours of discussion with Reich, he started to sketch out an evolutionary tree of canaries, similar to one Darwin had produced fifty years earlier for pigeons, and he placed Reich’s birds on one of the outermost branches. He thus signalled that these were birds whose song was most improved over the original wild ancestor, the most advanced and the most successful product of artificial selection, and therefore the highest point in canary culture. There were two reasons why Reich and his German predecessors were so motivated to create such birds. Most obvious was the beauty of the birds’ song. But it wasn’t a question of simply satisfying some Teutonic aesthetic fantasy. Duncker, who had read his Darwin, must have seen the remarkable parallel between canary culture and Darwin’s analysis of pigeon breeding: ‘The action of unconscious selection, as far as pigeons are concerned depends on a universal principle in human nature, namely on our rivalry, and desire to outdo our neighbours. We see this in every fleeting fashion.’22
Male rivalry takes a multitude of forms and it was inevitable that bird keepers would eventually appropriate the displays which male canaries and other birds used to enhance their own status and to lure female partners, and for exactly the same reason. The first such contests were singing competitions, which were judged on either the quantity or the quality of the birds’ vocal attributes. The species most often used were skylarks, goldfinches, linnets, greenfinches, chaffinches and later, of course, canaries.
The earliest record of these contests dates from 1456, when a chaffinch singing competition was held in the Harz Mountains. Singing contests may have started earlier still, when Otto the Great, Holy Roman Emperor, moved people into the Harz region to mine silver around 960, but the poor, unlike the rich, left few records of their pastimes.23 Flanders also has a long history of chaffinch contests, dating back to at least 1593 when there was a competition at Ypres. For the 200 years prior to 1800, Flemish chaffinch contests took place only in cities because, perversely, only city dwellers were allowed to catch birds. Their rural relatives were banned from doing so by their landlords, who jealously guarded all hunting rights.
The traditional chaffinch contest was a ‘strong singing’ test and the winner was simply the one that sang the highest number of complete songs in a set period of time – about five minutes’ duration. Another type, ‘distance singing’, was based on the number of songs a chaffinch performed in thirty minutes or an hour. In Germinal, Emile Zola describes an hour-long contest in a poor mining community in northern France. Fifteen nail makers, each with a dozen chaffinches – 180 birds in total hanging up on a fence in a yard – sing furiously against each other, each one urged on by its owner shouting at it in Walloon to sing more and more. A crowd of over a hundred spectators watches and waits until the score keepers eventually declare a winner and the owner receives his prize – a metal coffee pot.
In all types of competition the birds were kept in cloth-covered cages so that they could hear but not see their rivals – the same reason that Reich and all roller canary breeders kept their birds behind closed cage doors. Sometimes, as in Zola’s story, the chaffinches were blinded – usually by the unspeakably cruel process of touching the eyelids with a heated wire – because without distraction the birds were believed to sing better. In Belgium, a hot spot for such contests, blinding became illegal in 1921.
Song contest chaffinches were always taken from the wild and trappers sought out birds with particular vocal attributes. Wild chaffinches typically sing in bursts lasting about two seconds, interspersed with rest periods of seven to fifteen seconds. Dramatic regional differences in chaffinch singing meant that trappers seeking ‘distance singers’ inevitably converged on those areas where birds sang with the shortest breaks. Among wild birds the duration of individual songs varies rather little, so in order to be a winner a bird must have extremely short rest periods. Cramming 600 songs into an hour means that a bird with a two-second song must rest for an average of no more than four seconds between songs. This is an extraordinary output. Yet the birds that take part in the competitions, which still flourish in Flanders, sing at an even higher rate – one exceptional bird recently poured out some 1400 songs during a sixty-minute contest.24
The passion for these contests among the chaffinch song subculture was, and still is, remarkable. In London towards the end of the nineteenth century, champion chaffinches had cult followings, rather like those of racehorses today. Unlike the Continental competitions, those in London pubs often comprised pair-wise tournaments. An account from the 1890s describes one such contest in the Cock and Bottle pub in London’s East End. The match was between two ‘stunners’, Shoreditch Bobby and Kingsland Roarer, who arrived incognito in small, covered cages. As the clock struck eight the cages were hung side by side on the wall and their covers removed. As one bird started to sing the other responded, exactly as they would in the wild in a territorial dispute. The main difference here was that, unable to see each other, neither bird was intimidated and they continued to sing against each other relentlessly. Using a piece of chalk, two men, known as the ‘markers’, recorded every completed ‘strophe’ or ‘limb’ sung by each chaffinch. Occasionally the birds paused for a drink, much to the consternation of the crowd, for it was forbidden to shout or whistle encouragement, although coughing – which was unavoidable – was allowed. Two minutes from the end of the fifteen-minute contest, the Roarer – ahead by twenty points – inexplicably stopped singing and started to feed! His owner, seemingly unperturbed, pulled out a red handkerchief to mop his brow and, as if by magic, the bird hopped back on to its perch, resumed its relentless outpouring and won the competition.25
Sustained singing is energetically draining, which is, of course, the whole point. The crucial question, for me, is whether in the wild these winning birds would also be the most attractive to females, both for long-term relationships and for extramarital sex, which is common among chaffinches.26 My guess is that they would be. No one has measured how much effort it takes for chaffinches to perform like this, but there is no doubt that these birds sing much faster than they ever would in the wild. That chaffinches occasionally dropped dead during singing matches in the past also says something about how demanding these contests were, although the birds’ stress was undoubtedly exacerbated by the smoky pub atmosphere. The human equivalent of a chaffinch song contest is probably an operatic aria, the longest and most demanding of which is Brünnhilde’s sacrificial scene in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Like a chaffinch keeper, Wagner also seems to have pushed his performers to their limit. His first Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr, expired soon after the first performance. Some clarinet players say that ten minutes of continuous playing is about their limit, and ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’ is a particularly exhausting piece for oboe players. In men and birds alike, the performers run out of breath because their abdominal muscles become exhausted.
In Britain singing matches between chaffinches or other small birds, with the exception of the canary, are a thing of the past, although bird keepers still gossip about gypsies holding clandestine contests with £1000 stakes for goldfinches and other birds ‘somewhere in Essex’. In parts of Germany and Flemish-speaking areas of Belgium, however, chaffinch song contests continue undiminished. In 1973 Belgium banned the catching of all small birds except for the chaffinch and in 1999 no fewer than 10,000 wild chaffinches, mainly migrating birds from Scandinavia and Russia, were legally taken during the October – November trapping period specifically for the song contest cult. The birds have to be trained to sing in the proper manner because their foreign dialect won’t do at all. The competition rules are explicit in that the birds must finish each song with a Flemish flourish or suskewiet, and they must be taught to do this. The birds also have to be trained to sing very short songs. This is achieved by keeping freshly caught chaffinches with experienced birds that sing exactly the right way, in the hope that the new birds will pick up their tutors’ singing style. This works with about half the birds; those that fail to master the new song are released. To produce a fully trained bird takes three years, which may seem a long time, but chaffinches are durable and successful birds may compete over ten or more years – the record is twenty-nine years. ‘Fincheneers’, as they are known, are notoriously besotted by their birds, spending more time with them than with their wives and shedding more tears over the death of a bird than they do over a relative.27
Chaffinch singing contests have lately been pushed to the brink of extinction by the animal rights movement. Because it will soon be forbidden to take chaffinches from the wild the prospects for the Flemish fincheneers are uncertain. If they are to continue they will have to use chaffinches bred in captivity and they are full of gloom at the prospect. Catching the birds is part of the fun, but they also feel that captive-bred birds will limit what they have to work with. Still, the native bird-keeping cult in Britain (which was interested only in the birds’ appearance) suffered similar strictures fifty years ago and survived, just.
As soon as canaries fluttered down from their royal pedestal and became common and cheap, ordinary men started to pit them against each other in competitions. Initially, canary competitions were like most chaffinch contests and based exclusively on the quantity of song. But the last record of such contests is from Lancashire, northern England, in the late 1800s.28 Competing by numbers quickly gave way to a more sophisticated competition based on quality, fostered by the canary’s intellectual ability and inherently more varied song. This was possible because, unlike chaffinches and other songbirds, canaries were reared in captivity and so could be selectively bred and trained for the quality of their song.
