They who couple a Grey Cock and Grey Hen, which are both common, can expect none but a Grey Breed. But when different kinds are mix’d it falls out better, for Nature often delights in producing finer and more beautiful Birds than was expected.
HERVIEUX, A New Treatise of Canary Birds (1718)
Reich’s bird room soon became a second home for Hans Duncker, and most evenings after school he would join Reich for a chat and a cigar. They had resolved the nightingale song issue and Duncker was looking for a new challenge. One evening as Duncker peered through his tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles into a cage full of canaries he asked Reich about the appearance of his canaries. Why were some yellow, some a uniform dark-green and yet others variegated – a mixture of the two colours? Reich replied that most canaries were like this and colour was immaterial for those who were interested only in their song. He then added as an afterthought that in another branch of the fancy there were breeders who specialised in coloured canaries, like the new whites, or a washed-out brown variety called cinnamon. The English, Reich said, had a breed whose plumage resembled a reptile’s scales; the lizard canary, and there was even an orange-feathered bird, the Norwich – named after the city that made it famous. For good measure Reich mentioned that almost all the English ‘type’ canaries – those bred primarily for their body form – like the Norwich, Yorkshire and Lancashire Coppy also existed in green, yellow and variegated versions. Fascinated, Duncker thought about this for a while and then asked whether anyone knew how the different colours were inherited. Reich told him that as far as he knew it was pot luck and no one had ever studied this in detail. Duncker’s eyes lit up and he proposed there and then that they do the experiments themselves. Reich was game and they started to plan the pairings that would establish whether the colour of the canary’s plumage was inherited in a predictable Mendelian manner.
It was well known among canary enthusiasts that wild canaries were green and that the yellow colour of the domesticated birds was a mutation. Duncker wanted first to establish whether green plumage was dominant over yellow, just as roundness was dominant over wrinkledness in Mendel’s peas. Before they started, he decided to check whether anyone else had previously investigated the inheritance of canary colours. From his conversations with Reich he knew that canary fanciers had written on the subject, but he was surprised to discover that several scientists had also studied canary colours. There were two relevant accounts,1 both published in 1908. The first was an article by an English woman, referred to as ‘Miss Durham’, on the inheritance of cinnamon plumage. The other article was by a well-known American biologist, Charles Davenport, who had investigated the inheritance of both canary crests and colours. The two papers could not have been more different. Miss Durham’s was concise and precise, a model of clarity, and her results were reliable because they were based on hundreds of canary offspring. The other paper was a muddle from start to finish, and Duncker found it difficult to see how Davenport could so confidently conclude that both colour and crests obeyed Mendelian rules. To make matters worse, Davenport had used very few birds in his research, casting further doubt on his conclusions. On the plus side, Davenport’s paper did include a fascinating account of the canary’s early history and domestication. Duncker later found that he was not alone in questioning Davenport’s conclusions, and that this particular study had engendered a bitter dispute among fanciers and geneticists alike.
What was absolutely clear from both accounts was that the issue of colour was a long way from being resolved, so Duncker set about designing his own experiment to establish the genetic basis of colour once and for all. At the beginning of 1923, Duncker and Reich paired together different combinations of the three basic colour forms: yellow, green and variegated birds – seventy pairs in total – which, by July, under Reich’s superb management had reared a staggering total of 517 youngsters. Some of the results were clear-cut: two pure-bred yellow parents generally produced yellow offspring, and green parents always hatched green babies. But it was the other pairings that yielded the most intriguing results. Pairs comprising one green and one yellow bird invariably produced variegated offspring and variegated birds paired together tended to produce offspring which varied enormously – from pure yellow to almost completely green, with everything else in between. Duncker was intrigued to see that the patches of green plumage on these variegated birds were not distributed at random over the birds’ bodies and even in birds that were predominantly yellow, patches of dark plumage persisted rather predictably around the eye and on the wings. It was these plumage patterns that led him to the realisation that the canary’s colours were controlled by several different factors (what we now call genes) – each responsible for a different region. Despite this unexpected complexity, Duncker was able to conclude, with a sense of satisfaction, that canary colours did indeed follow Mendelian rules.2
Between bird-room conversations about their breeding results there seems little doubt that Reich and Duncker discussed the increasingly desperate state of the economy. As inflation spiralled out of control and they saw their hard-earned savings become worthless, both men must have felt distinctly gloomy. The inflation rate was so high that they joked about meals increasing in value as they were being eaten. But this was no joking matter. Since the end of World War I the harsh peace terms imposed by the Allies had rendered the German economy extremely fragile. It was made worse by the Allies’ reparation demands that Germany attempted to fulfil by massive borrowing, which in turn gave rise to the inflation. The middle classes – people like Reich and Duncker – were especially hard hit and later made them a rich recruiting ground for the National Socialists. The Weimar Republic, formed in 1920, was a government born of defeat and one that nurtured political unrest. Then, in November 1923, as Duncker prepared the results of the variegation experiments for publication, the unrest exploded and sixteen protesters were shot dead on the streets of Munich as Adolf Hitler attempted to seize power. Ever since 1921, when he became chairman of the National Socialist Party, with its programme of ‘anti-Semitism, simplistic economic theory and pseudo-socialist rhetoric’, Hitler had been agitating for reform. His November coup, however, was swiftly foiled by the police and he ended up in prison, where he started to document his struggle for existence, Mein Kampf, and for a while, at least, things returned to normal. In fact, they started to improve, for in January 1924 the Allies reduced the reparation payments, marking what was for many Germans the real end of the war. The period of economic stability that followed saw a cultural revival during which artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus flourished, and Hans Duncker was at his most productive.3
Duncker went back to Göttingen and to the library. Little had changed in this medieval town since his student days, but there was one thing he was keen to see – the Gänseliesl or goose-girl – who stood in the centre of town in front of the town hall. The most popular girl in Göttingen, she reputedly received a kiss from every student (most of them were men) on the day they graduated. Hans smiled at the idea as he walked past her statue on his way to the library. There he re-read Davenport’s 1908 account of the canary’s early history and his confident assertion that the canary’s transition from green to yellow had occurred in just a few generations. The idea that this change, which was thought to have happened around 1700, was a swift one was consistent with the view held by a group of scientists, including Davenport, who referred to themselves as ‘Mendelians’. They held that most domestic forms of animals and plants arose more or less spontaneously as ‘sports’, which were then rapidly fixed by artificial selection. But Davenport’s claim regarding the canary’s rapid change flew in the face of Duncker’s and Reich’s recent results. Duncker knew that with several separate genes involved, the green-to-yellow transition could not possibly have been rapid and, in fact, must have been painfully slow. Had the canary’s yellow plumage been controlled by a single gene – a single mutation – the transition certainly could have taken place within only a few generations, equivalent to having to get just one number in a lottery. But because it was clear from Duncker’s experiments that the canary’s plumage colour was polygenic and controlled by several separate genes, the change from green to pure yellow would have taken many generations. Capturing a polygenic trait is more like trying to get a specific set of numbers in a lottery and much harder than getting a single one, and hence requires many more attempts.
When Karl Reich’s nightingale-canaries were rated ‘outstanding’ by the Kassel judges in 1922 the media dubbed Reich as the ‘new Hervieux’. This was praise indeed for Joseph-Charles Chastanier Hervieux de Chanteloup was the canary pioneer. His book, A New Treatise on Canaries (1705), was the first ever monograph on canaries and Hervieux’s ability to train canaries to sing was unsurpassed. In short, Hervieux was the ultimate canary connoisseur and when Hans Duncker started to track down some of the old accounts of canary history, it was to his wonderful little book he turned first. The successive editions of Hervieux’s New Treatise provided an unrivalled set of snapshots of canary culture through the eighteenth century.4
Hervieux was chief canary wrangler to the Princesse de Condé, also known as Madame la Princesse. She was the long-suffering wife of Henri-Jules, the Prince de Condé, and they lived in the palace at Chantilly, just outside Paris. Ugly, anorexic and alcoholic, the prince was a sad case. His father, the Grand Condé, was an outstanding soldier with high hopes that his son would follow in his footsteps, but Henri-Jules’s attempts at soldiering failed miserably. The prince married the fifteen-year-old Anne of Bavaria in 1663, making her the Princesse de Condé, but like so many royal marriages this was a political and tedious union, whose main purpose was to inject some fresh blood into an increasingly inbred aristocracy. The strategy worked and the marriage proved to be a productive one. Apart from siring heirs – ten in total – Henri-Jules passed his time dabbling in the arts and with science, but he excelled only in reckless and extravagant entertaining. As he aged he became more and more erratic, terrorising his wife and children with malicious practical jokes. The princess took refuge in Chantilly’s vast menagerie established many years earlier by her father-in-law. The canaries were her favourites and some time in the 1690s she employed Hervieux to look after them. The princess was by then middle-aged, and the production of ten children and a lifetime of marital torment had taken their toll, but she was warm-hearted and generous to those she liked, and Hervieux quickly became a favourite. Young Hervieux and the canaries proved to be a perfect distraction. She revelled in his rearing, nursing and training of her canaries, and for him royal patronage was more than he could ever have hoped for.
Hervieux was a sharp operator: in addition to his sure touch with birds, he knew how to please his royal mistress. He could train canaries to sing particular airs and had invented a flageolet especially for this purpose. He also orchestrated spectacular canary singing concerts for the princess and her children. Encouraged by the princess, Hervieux was just twenty-two when his book was published in 1705. The timing was impeccable. Canaries had become increasingly popular, particularly among the female aristocracy, and a reliable account of their care, breeding and training was much needed. The book was extraordinarily popular and went through no less than ten French and several foreign editions, and remained in print for over a century. Hervieux knew his canaries and wrote beautifully, and much of his information is as applicable today as it was 300 years ago. Despite his success, however, Hervieux himself remains something of a mystery. No portrait exists, but legend has it that even at the relatively youthful age of twenty-five he looked like a bird, with a huge hooked nose and a ‘petite complection’. It was said that in later life he did not sleep in a bed but instead roosted on an armchair. His official title was ‘governor of canaries’ and reading the dedication to his Princesse, one might be forgiven for imagining that he was in love with her. He might well have been, even though she was thirty-five years his senior, but Hervieux also knew on which side his bread was buttered and at the time such sycophantic dedicatories were de rigueur.5
I take the liberty of offering your Highness this small work, which already belongs to you, because it is only on account of the canaries belonging to your Highness that I have undertaken it. The title of governor of the canaries, with which she was kind enough to honour me herself, gave birth to the idea of making these comments: and I thought that to deserve the title it was my duty to work upon the conservation of these charming little birds which sometimes entertain and relax the spirit of your Highness. In order to succeed in this, I have dedicated myself with particular care to gathering everything that might be necessary, as much for their rearing, as for their preservation [keeping them alive]. The innocent pleasure which your Highness can take, is not unworthy of the high rank which she holds, nor of the improvement of the mind which makes her shine everywhere, since St Jean, that great saint, and preoccupied as he was, continually meditating upon celestial things, but was still able to relax with his Partridge. Since, madame, you emulate the saints in their virtues, you can also emulate them in their spiritual pleasures, which they bring back to God, admiring in the smallest creature the infinite wisdom of the creator. I would consider myself very fortunate if your Highness would be so kind as to grant this book the honour of your protection from which alone it can draw all of its merit; and allow me to say with very profound respect and deep gratitude of your serene highness, very humble, very obedient and very indebted servant, J. C. Hervieux.
Hervieux’s book marked a turning point in bird keeping. Among other things, it inspired a new profession, the ‘siffleur d’oiseaux’, the bird whistler; the peripatetic canary teacher, the first personal trainer. Three times a week the siffleur turned up at the homes of bored and wealthy women to train their canaries to sing. A variety of instruments was Used to create these airs; a flageolet, the German flute and a small water-filled whistle, which produced a bubbling or warbling sound. You can still buy ceramic versions of these in Portuguese gift shops where they are now sold as children’s toys. As well as describing how to train a young canary to sing, Hervieux’s book provided details of how to breed canaries, which the French had to this point largely imported from Germany. More significant for Duncker, Hervieux listed no fewer than twenty-eight varieties of canary existing in the 1700s, providing a tantalising glimpse of the domestication process. Much has since been made of Hervieux’s extended list and it now seems that most of his varieties were simply colour variations rather than separate strains as we would define them today. Baron von Pernau, writing at about the same time as Hervieux, but from Germany, had a rather less expansive list, recognising only five main varieties: dark yellow, pallid yellow, partly black (that is, variegated), white and mealy – the colour of bread.6
Where did the canaries that kept Hervieux in business, distracted Madame la Princesse from her lunatic husband and made Reich famous come from? From the Canary Islands, of course, albeit by a circuitous route. Almost every book ever published on canaries starts with the story of how in the sixteenth century a ship bound for Leghorn (Livorno) with a cargo of wild canaries from the Canary Islands was wrecked off the island of Elba, off the north-west coast of Italy. Miraculously, some of the birds escaped the sinking ship and flew to Elba. As was typical at that time, the exported canaries were all males and in order to propagate themselves in their new home – so the story goes – they were forced to breed with some of Elba’s resident female serins. Their distinctive offspring in due course formed the basis for many of the canaries that would later be exported across Europe. The shipwreck story is usually attributed to Giovanni Pietro Olina, whose lavish volume on bird catching and keeping, L’Uccelliera, published in Rome in 1622, tells the tale, but it actually appeared first in an obscure book published by another Italian, Antonio Valli da Todi, twenty-one years earlier.7 Here is Todi’s original version of the story: ‘On the Island of Elba one can also find cross-bred Canaries descended from true ones, for the following reason: a ship coming from Canaria to these parts was wrecked over the rocks of this Island and, carrying many of these birds, they arrived on the said island where they are [now] found; they are as large as a siskin, but much yellower on the chin than the true canary, and have black feet, and such is the cross-bred male.’
Subsequent writers embellished the shipwreck legend, a process analogous to the errors that occur in the copying and re-copying of DNA from generation to generation. Here is a version from an anonymous canary book published in 1873:8
A bark, laden with dried fruits, spices, and canaries, came to grief on the coast of that pleasant Mediterranean island [of Elba]; when the birds escaping, found the climate suitable to their constitution, and betook themselves to its orchards and other shady and leafy retreats, where they claimed a republic, dreamt of liberty, and revelled in the idea of never-ending enjoyment. But alas! Poor birds, their anticipations and visions of freedom were shortlived; for the attention of the peasants being attracted by their beauty and their sweet notes, traps and nets were set for the little waifs and strays thus thrown on their island; and ere long the captives were dispersed over the continent of Europe.
In this account the notion of the birds being cross-bred or having hybridised with the local finches has disappeared altogether. Other versions assert that descendants of the hybrid offspring eventually flew to mainland Italy, where the locals caught them and thereafter devoted themselves to the rearing and selling of canaries. Another account involved a Dutch sailor who managed to catch a few pairs ‘which once introduced to his country, multiplied very easily in captivity’.
As Hervieux knew, the Elba shipwreck story was a fantasy. Like most fantasies, however, it does contain a grain of truth, which is that there are some very odd canary-like birds on Elba. The mystery of their identity wasn’t resolved until almost 400 years after Todi’s account, when two Italian ornithologists rediscovered a painting of the ‘Elba canary’ in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Painted around 1630 by the talented Vincenzo Leonardi, the picture shows not a canary but a completely different species, the citril finch. Leonardi’s painting is so accurate that we can also see this isn’t a typical citril finch (like those which live in the mountains of mainland Europe), but the rather distinctive Corsican race of citril finch. In other words, the hybrid canary of Elba is a red herring.9
Olina did more than borrow the Elba canary story from Valli da Todi. Their two books are suspiciously similar in every other respect. The similarity led later scholars to think that Olina was a crook: the plagiarist’s plagiarist, they called him. As one writer pointed out, ‘Plagiarism was common . . . but Olina easily stands first as an adept at this practice.’ On the face of it, Olina’s rehash of Valli’s book looks like a blatant case of unacknowledged borrowing. It wasn’t Olina who was the crook, however, but one of his powerful patrons. His magnificent book was commissioned by Cassiano dal Pozzo employed at the court of Pope Urbano VIII. Cassiano arrived in Rome in 1618 keen to carve a career for himself. He used his immense diplomatic skills to make Rome the centre of European culture and arts, accumulating vast collections of historical, artistic and natural history works as well as commissioning new ones. He soon became a key player in the new wave of scientific objectivity of which Galileo was a part and which demanded the accurate portrayal of nature. An astute observer and bird-fancier, Cassiano used the same care in describing plumage as he did when recounting what the ladies at the European courts were wearing.10 It was he who arranged for Giovanni Pietro Olina to prepare the definitive book on bird keeping for the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of Lynxes), Italy’s premier cultural organisation founded in 1603, whose aim was to use its sharp eyesight to penetrate the secrets of nature.
Twenty years earlier, in 1601, Antonio Valli had published his book Il Canto degli Uccelli (The Song of Birds) – but few copies were printed and it might have disappeared without a trace had not Cardinal Del Monte, one of Cassiano’s protectors, owned one and liked it. Cassiano and Olina realised that Valli’s book could form the basis for a more comprehensive and elaborate volume. Accordingly, Valli’s original text was tarted up by adding a few classical references and some scientific facts, and one of the original illustrators, Antonio Tempesta – now somewhat aged – was wheeled out of retirement to retouch and improve his original plates. There were new illustrations, too, notably by the great natural history artist Vincenzo Leonardi, who painted the ‘Elba canary’ found in the Windsor Castle library centuries later. After months of preparation, on 15 August 1622 Cassiano presented L’Uccelliera to the Accademia with the following message: ‘I send you this bird book produced by one of my affiliates as a tribute of my respect, as evidence that the information I gather with limited effort and money can contribute towards this field [of science].’
Cassiano hadn’t gone to all this trouble out of mere scientific curiosity or academic altruism. The truth was that he was desperate to get himself elected to the Accademia. He had written much of the new book himself, but resisted the temptation of adding his name to Olina’s as co-author because he was terrified that the Inquisition and the Church might misjudge his motives. It was distinctly dangerous to be seen to be overtly ambitious or indeed overly curious about the natural world in the Italian royal court, as Galileo was to discover to his cost a decade later. Olina was the fall guy and if things turned sour it would be he and not Cassiano who got nailed. But in fact they both emerged smelling of roses. L’Uccelliera was a stunning success for Olina, running through numerous editions and the Accademia eventually acknowledged Cassiano’s monumental contribution to science and art by allowing him to join their ranks.
The wild canary comes, as its name implies, from the Canaries – best known now as the holiday islands of Tenerife, Lanzarote and Gran Canaria. Canaries also occur on the islands of Madeira and the Azores, where they were probably deliberately introduced. Originally referred to as ‘Canary-birds’, they were named for the islands rather than the other way around. The islands were previously known as ‘Canaria’ in recognition of the large dogs (Canis) that the occupants owned in ancient times. In the first century ad, the Romans referred to the archipelago as ‘The Fortunate Isles’ on account of their benign climate – lying as they do at the same latitude as Cairo, but with the benefit of ocean breezes and good rainfall. After their brief encounter with the Romans the islands and their inhabitants enjoyed more than 1200 years of blissful obscurity before they were rediscovered in the mid-1300s. Word got around, and at the turn of the century the French adventurer Jean de Bethencourt arrived and began the bloody business of conquest, subjugation and settlement in the name of the King of Spain. Legend has it that Bethencourt was so impressed by the song of the caged canaries owned by the local people that he took some back with him as gifts to the court of Castille.11 He later gave one to the Queen of France, Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of Charles VI – thereby initiating the French royal family’s protracted love affair with the canary. In the hundred years following Bethencourt’s arrival on the Canaries, having succeeded in completely eliminating the islands’ human population, successive Spanish expeditions began to plunder their birds.
The Spanish were astute traders and maintained a shrewd monopoly on canary birds, allowing only live males to be exported to Europe. Louis XI, King of France from 1461 to 1483, famous for founding three universities, is said to have been particularly fond of canaries and other songbirds. He apparently bought chardonnerets, lignots, verdiers and pincons (goldfinches, linnets, greenfinches and chaffinches) by the hundreds, and canaries – by the dozen. As transport increased, canary birds were imported more frequently into mainland Europe and by the middle of the 1500s the export of canaries was a well-established and highly profitable business. A single shipment in 1546 comprised twenty-five dozen birds from Gran Canaria. Overall, the numbers exported each year must have amounted to thousands and this vigorous trade in wild birds continued unabated for at least a further 200 years. The London Gazette in 1685 reported the arrival of 700 canary birds from Canary. In view of what happened elsewhere under similar circumstances (see Chapter 9) and the relatively low numbers of wild canaries available – a world population of no more than 160,000 pairs in total – it is remarkable that they were not exterminated in the frenzy to supply the demanding European markets.12
One of the great polymaths of the Late Middle Ages, William Turner (c. 1510–68), famous for his Herball and revered as the father of British botany, but also as an ornithologist, provides one of the earliest records of canaries in Europe.13 Discussing the canary grass Phalaris canariensis, on whose seeds the birds were maintained, he said, ‘. . . for they that brought Canari burdes out of Spayn bought of the sede Phalaris also to fede them with’. Even though he had never seen one, Turner’s close friend, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner, included the canary in his animal encyclopaedia, Historia Animalium, published in the 1550s, on the strength of Turner’s description. Gessner wrote, ‘It is sold everywhere very dear, both for the sweetness of its singing, and also because it is brought from far remote places, so that it is wont only to be kept by nobles and great men.’
Spain at this time had an empire on which it was said that the sun never set. But late in the sixteenth century the sun did start to dip below the horizon and one of the first indications of Spanish decline was its loss of the canary monopoly. Until this time anyone wanting one purchased an imported, wild-caught male bird from a Spanish dealer. But the occasional female must have slipped through the nets, despite the traders’ best efforts. Having got their hands on females, it was the Germans, in their typically organised way, who set about breeding them and who, by avoiding all the middlemen and the transportation costs, eventually undercut the Spaniards. As soon as they could reliably rear canaries, the German bird enthusiasts either wittingly or unwittingly started the process of artificial selection – partly on colour, but primarily on the canary’s song. Breeding canaries for song was a monumental commercial success both within Germany and abroad, generating a trade that persisted for 350 years. Canaries were marketed across the length and breadth of Europe and Hervieux recounts how when German dealers brought birds to Paris twice a year in spring and autumn, scuffles broke out as people rushed to buy them.14 He had a jaundiced view of the German traders:
When you go to ask Questions of them concerning their Canary-Birds, or other such like Affairs, without Buying any thing, they give you a very bad Reception, and in short, they use you very roughly . . . but as soon as you show them that precious Metal, without which the most Ingenuous Man is not valu’d, I say, when they perceive you come to Buy some of their Canary-Birds, they receive you very courteously, and in their broken Language express themselves very much your Humble Servant . . .
In England the naturalist John Ray, writing in 1678, reported that the canary birds imported from Germany ‘in handsomeness and song excel those brought out of the Canaries’. The birds were so popular that German entrepreneurs set up what we might now describe as canary-leasing businesses in which, for an appropriate fee, someone would deliver a singing bird, turn up every day to feed and water it and, when it stopped singing, replace it with another. You could even specify whether you wanted a daytime or a night-time singer.15 The other thing the Germans did, albeit unwittingly, was to ‘domesticate’ the canary.
In each case starting with a single species, humans have created more than 300 breeds of domestic pigeon, over a hundred dogs, dozens of breeds of cats, mice, sheep, pigs and cattle, and some seventy breeds of canary. Darwin was overwhelmed by the success of farmers, stock-breeders and pet owners in producing these different breeds. He exploited their success to explain the mystery of mysteries: the origin of species. Using man’s artificial selection of varieties as an analogy for natural selection was a stroke of genius. This was the heyday of animal breeding, and everyone in Victorian England and elsewhere in Europe was well aware of the ‘improvement’ that had been made in the different breeds of farm animals and pets by artificial selection. Domestication is the largest experiment ever undertaken, but prior to Darwin no one saw any value whatsoever in trying to understand its results. It took an immense effort, but in essence all Darwin had to do to make his point about natural selection was to draw a careful parallel between the ways the hand of man and the hand of nature selected the fit and weeded out the rest.16
What Darwin did not bother to pursue was the question of what predisposed particular species to become domesticated in the first place. This was left to his younger scientific cousin, Francis Galton – dilettante and brilliant maverick – who recognised that to have any chance of becoming domesticated, animals must fulfil six criteria.17 They had to be hardy, comfort-loving, useful (‘to the savages’), free-breeding, easy to tend and they had to have an inborn liking for people.
By ‘comfort-loving’ Galton simply meant that they should settle down and adjust to captivity, and not constantly try to escape. Animals had to be useful, either as a source of food (like chickens, sheep, pigs and cattle), as protectors (like dogs), or as hunting assistants (dogs again). Unless animals bred freely in captivity then, like many zoo animals, they would never become domesticated. Galton’s idea that animals should be easy to tend has been paraphrased by others who noted that to become domesticated animals must be able to thrive on neglect. More generally, what Galton had in mind was that livestock should be versatile in their diet and show a tendency to remain together, allowing themselves to be herded and controlled. The final attribute, a liking for people, refers to the idea that animals should be socially subservient and accept humans as their natural leaders.
Galton summed up his treatise on domestication by saying, ‘It would appear that every wild animal had had its chance of being domesticated, that those few which fulfilled the above conditions were domesticated long ago, but that the large remainder, who fail sometimes in only one small particular, are destined to perpetual wildness so long as their race continues. As civilisation extends they are doomed to be gradually destroyed off the face of the earth as useless consumers of cultivated produce.’ In addition to his essay on domestication, Galton is remembered for two things. He discovered that human fingerprints were unique and could be used to identify individuals, and he was responsible for coining the term and starting the study of eugenics – the idea that humans, like domestic animals, could be selectively bred and ‘improved’. The way Galton introduced this idea seemed more than reasonable: ‘Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he also has the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful . . .’ This syrupy language masked a programme to promote naturally gifted members of society, the genetic elite – like himself – at the expense of the rest.
Leaving aside for a moment the fact that, through no fault of their own, canaries became mixed up in the eugenics movement, how applicable are Galton’s six attributes to the wild canary? To have survived the boat journey from their native islands to the shores of mainland Europe and beyond, the original wild canaries must indeed have been very hardy. One of the most important consequences of domestication was the accidental – and brutal – selection of healthy, vigorous birds. Judging from the numbers of pages devoted to remedies for various ‘direful maladies’ in early books, captive canaries must have been horribly susceptible to disease – in part because they were often kept in squalid conditions. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that their eighteenth-century owners knew precious little about maintaining themselves in a sanitary condition. Paris at this time was described as stinking with filth and during the 1700s the entire country was ravaged by wave after wave of plague.18 Hervieux, however, knew how important cleanliness was in keeping his birds in good health, as indeed did another nation of canary fanatics, the Dutch, whose national obsession with cleanliness is thought to have contributed to their particular success with breeding canaries.19
The concept of ‘comfort-loving’ canaries is a mystery. Everyone who has taken wild canaries into captivity in the last hundred years or so and written about their experience has commented on how reluctant their birds were to settle down – they never become tame. Is this surprising? Should we expect any wild animal to recognise the benefits of captivity and sit back and enjoy its numerous advantages? Remarkably, that is just what some species of birds do and it was precisely this characteristic that made the goldfinch the most popular native cage bird in Europe. In his handbook on birds published in 1676, Francis Willughby described the goldfinch, thus:20 ‘They are of a mild and gentle nature, as may even hence appear, that presently after they are caught, without using any art or care, they will fall to their meat and drink, nor are they scared and affrighted at the presence of man, as to strike their bills and wings against the sides of the cage, as most birds are wont to do.’ The wild canary was the antithesis of this.
Canaries were never ‘useful to the savages’ in the way that pigs, sheep or dogs were: their only value was their song. They were a luxury and on the Canary Islands they were kept because people enjoyed listening to them. But once the first representatives of European royal courts appeared there, canaries suddenly became extremely useful as status-enhancing souvenirs.
Wild canaries in captivity certainly were not free-breeding, and their reluctance to reproduce is closely linked with their resistance to settle down. Those who keep wild canaries have complained about the extraordinary difficulty of getting them to breed and have been amazed that anyone in the past ever succeeded.21
Canaries, like many other finches, are very easy to tend and can survive on little more than dried grass seeds, a bit of grit (to grind up the seed in their gizzard) and water. The reason other fine singers like nightingales, blackbirds and larks never became domesticated is that they require much more sophisticated diets than the canary.
It is far from clear whether wild canaries ever had ‘an inborn liking for humans’, although the tameness of domesticated birds was certainly one of the attributes that later made them popular.
In summary, wild canaries fail miserably on two of Galton’s six criteria: they are neither ‘comfort-loving’ nor ‘free-breeding’. How, then, did canaries become domesticated? The most likely explanation is that although the majority of exported canaries were taken from the wild as adult birds, some at least must have been young birds, taken from the nest and reared by hand. This was common practice on mainland Europe – Hervieux gives detailed instructions on how to do it with all sorts of bird species22 – and it meant that young canaries, like Nicolai’s Gimpels, grew up believing their human owner to be their parent. The local people on the Canary Islands must have known, even by Jean de Bethencourt’s time, that hand-reared birds sing more and survive better because they don’t thrash around their cage trying to escape. In addition, tame canaries would also have been much more valuable as trade objects than neurotic ones. All the recent writers describing bad experiences with wild canaries in captivity have had wild-caught adult birds. Hand-reared canaries would have been comfort-loving and much more likely to breed in German aviaries.
Being bigger, sexier, dafter and less colourful than your wild counterparts is an inevitable consequence of domestication.23 Domesticated animals are invariably larger than their wild ancestors, partly because breeders have artificially selected them for size, but also because captive animals overeat and under-exercise. But why sexier? Because by definition domestication selects for animals that will breed in captivity. Attempts to study the process of domestication with wild-caught rats, for example, have shown that only a minority of individuals ever reproduce in captivity. Those that do are the more sexually motivated, with the result that domesticated animals tend to breed more frequently than their wild ancestors. The jungle fowl, progenitor of the domestic chicken, becomes sexually active at one year old, but chickens are ready to breed at just three months old. In a year a typical jungle fowl would lay one or two clutches of a dozen eggs while their domesticated descendants pump out over 300 in the same period.
Dafter? Think of sheep – sadly lacking in common sense, some of which has been lost because breeders positively wanted more docile and manageable stock, but also because the intense selection pressure provided by predators like wolves in the wild has been removed. Domestication is little more than survival of the dumbest – under the guiding hand of man. But stupidity is not simply a product of the genes. It is a direct consequence of an institutionalised life.24 Domestic life may be bliss but it is also unstimulating, and an unstimulated brain – even a bird brain – is only half a brain. New research has shown that even wild-caught birds are less intelligent than their wild counterparts. The bird’s brain is a powerhouse of neuronal rejuvenation. Nerve cells come and go with unbelievable frequency, and in response to the cognitive challenges of finding food, dodging sharp-clawed predators, learning to sing and selecting a partner. Without these everyday challenges, the rate of neuronal renewal is depleted and the brains of captive birds actually decrease in size. These recent findings have shaken the very foundations of neuroscience because it was previously assumed that, as in ourselves, the brain an animal is born with is the one it is stuck with. But birds seem to be unique in their dynamic pattern of cell replacement, allowing them constantly to update their faculties with no overall increase in brain tissue or metabolic costs.25
Of all the traits shown by domesticated animals, the loss of colour is perhaps the most obvious. Indeed, we often recognise an animal as being domesticated simply from its colour: white rats, white mice, white cattle, white rabbits and white cats are all missing their normal dark pigments. Sometimes the loss of pigment is total, resulting in pink-eyed individuals – albinos. If the loss is limited to the skin (including the feathers in birds) the result is referred to as ‘leucism’, a white individual with dark eyes. Sometimes only one of several pigments is missing: wild budgerigars are green and, just as with paints, this results from a mixture of blue and yellow colours in the feathers. An absence of yellow results in the familiar blue budgerigar; if the blue is absent, we get a yellow bird. Often the colour difference between the wild and the domesticated forms is due to a single gene and, remarkably, in a few cases biologists have even located the gene among the tens of thousands, and figured out exactly how it creates its colour-diluting effects. In the canary’s case, Duncker’s research showed that the canary’s transformation from green to yellow occurred as a result of the change in at least three genes and the concomitant loss of a dark pigment, melanin, from the feathers.
Duncker’s genetic knowledge and ability to conduct and interpret his canary experiments were largely self-taught. Genetics was still a very young discipline when he finished his university studies in 1905. There was a huge amount of interest in patterns of inheritance at this time, especially among researchers in America and Britain. We know that Duncker was an exemplary teacher and that he kept up to date with new developments in biology, including genetics. His understanding of genetics – particulate inheritance subject to the laws of probability – must have been greatly facilitated by his aptitude for physics and mathematics, which he also taught. Duncker had probably inherited his Darwinian views as a student from the pervasive Ernst Haeckel without, it seems, accepting Haeckel’s Lamarckian belief in ‘progress’. Instead, Duncker focused on pure Mendelian inheritance; inheritance devoid of any outside influence or purpose. Such was Duncker’s enthusiasm for Mendelism that he taught it at school, demonstrating its truth by conducting simple genetic experiments for his pupils. From the books and papers Duncker cited in his own publications it is clear that he watched the field of genetics grow from its uncertain and controversy-ridden beginnings to the more mature and forward-looking period around 1920. By the time of his meeting with Reich, Duncker knew and understood all that there was to know about the way traits, such as plumage colour, were inherited.
The manner in which the canary’s green-to-yellow transformation came about resembles the situation in which a family has had a much-loved but very familiar painting in its possession for generations and barely given it a second glance. Then one day a patch of paint flakes off, revealing that underlying the well-known image there may be another much more attractive one.
We know that there were yellow canaries in William Hogarth’s day in the early 1700s. At this time England was a country of pickpockets, press-gangs, wig-wearing workers, urban filth, rural poor, child chimney sweeps, slaves, grave robbers, public hangings, gin mania, cockfighting, Fanny Hill and rickets, as well as enthusiastic bird keepers. In London alone there were an estimated 200,000 canaries and people craved information about their pets and how to care for them.26 Accordingly, several books on bird keeping were produced in the early 1700s – many published anonymously and most pirating each other’s information. In 1718 even Hervieux’s book was translated into English – possible only because of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 and also marked the end of decades of animosity between the French and the English, and opened up trade and cultural exchange between the two countries. Wonderful as Hervieux’s book was, it had no pictures and was eclipsed in England by another, using a brilliant marketing ploy for the first time – a bird book with colour plates. Eleazar Albin’s three volume A Natural History of Birds was published in 1731, 1734 and 1738 and its lifelike colour images must have made it irresistible to better-off bird enthusiasts.27 Born in Germany, Eleazar Weiss moved to England in 1707 in his mid-twenties, changed his name to Albin and set up shop near the Dog and Duck public house on Tottenham Court Road, London, as a professional watercolourist and art teacher. He and his daughter Elizabeth drew and coloured the plates for their book, priding themselves on having drawn the birds from life (which sometimes meant from death) – including a very special canary.
Albin describes the various types of canary then available, including all-yellow birds, but the one he illustrated was white. He knew what he was doing, for although white canaries were not uncommon in his native Germany, they were extremely rare in England and he knew that fanciers loved unusual birds. His three-volume work depicted several extraordinary birds, including a black bullfinch and a strange hybrid described in the next chapter, and he went out of his way to find such oddities. In the preface to the first volume he wrote, ‘I will be very thankful to any Gentleman that will be pleased to send any curious birds (which shall be drawn and [en]graved for the second volume, and their names shall be mentioned as Encouragers of the work) to Eleazar Albin.’
All but one of the plates in Albin’s book were drawn and coloured by himself or his daughter. The exception was the ‘Red Linnet Cock’, which was coloured by Albin’s eighteen-year-old son, Fortin. The reason why Fortin was allowed to colour this particular plate may have been because he helped to make the red pigment. In preparing his colours, Eleazar Albin sometimes used what today at least would seem like novel ingredients and it was said that ‘for his reds he washed dried vermilion pigment in four waters and then proceeded to grind it in boys’ urine three times, then gum it and grind it in Brandy wine’. Presumably Fortin supplied the urine, but it is not clear why Elizabeth’s wouldn’t have done just as well – unless a touch of testosterone added a certain je ne sais quoi.
Albin’s book was a landmark in bird publishing, although not everyone rated it highly. Duncker’s contemporary Erwin Stresemann,28 director of the Zoology Museum in Berlin, considered Eleazar’s and his daughter’s talents very limited and described Albin as being ‘as clumsy with the pen as with the brush’. Stresemann was particularly critical because Albin, knowing nothing about birds, had lifted his entire text from earlier writers. To be fair, so had just about everyone else and at least Albin had the grace to say from whom the information was stolen.
Because plagiarism was so pervasive, paintings provide a much more reliable record of the canary’s change from green to yellow than written accounts. But the search for pictorial records was to be undertaken not in England or France but in Germany, the crucible of canary creation. Erwin Stresemann was the first to recognise the scientific value of bird illustrations after discovering in 1922 that his museum’s vaults contained some beautiful canary paintings dating back to 1600.
Stresemann’s interest in art and canaries typified his all-embracing approach to ornithology and in his mid-thirties he single-handedly, but with great determination, began the modern revolution in bird knowledge.29 Before 1925 the study of birds had been the domain of amateurs and dilettantes. Through his astute appreciation of what was worth pursuing, Stresemann pushed ornithology to the vanguard of mainstream zoology. His own ornithological work at the Berlin Museum spanned almost every aspect of zoology, from migration and anatomy to behaviour and evolution, including the process of domestication. Stresemann liked Duncker’s work, for Duncker too was forging novel links and squeezing knowledge sequestered by generations of bird keepers into a scientific mould. Stresemann was also sympathetic to Duncker’s interest in cage birds, probably because Stresemann’s own career had begun when, at the age of sixteen, he published his first paper describing how he had successfully created a hybrid between two cage birds, goldfinch and redpoll. Unlike most of his colleagues, who ignored domesticated birds because they were not ‘real’, Stresemann appreciated that their story could reveal something about the origin of species, which, despite the title of Darwin’s book published sixty years earlier, was by no means resolved or understood.30
The paintings Stresemann discovered in the Zoology Museum’s vaults were by Lazarus Röting, whose entire collection of natural history art had been bound together for safe-keeping and entitled ‘Theatrum Naturae’ by his nephew in 1615, the year after Röting died. So named because his desperate parents hoped for a miracle, Lazarus was born in 1549 with glassy-bone disease, osteogenesis imperfecta, the same condition that later afflicted the painter Toulouse-Lautrec. Like Lautrec, Lazarus Röting’s legs were damaged before he even set foot into the world. He was the runt in a brood of fifteen children and remained a cripple throughout his life. His father, who taught languages and theology at the Gymnasium in Nuremberg, tutored his housebound son at home and Lazarus in turn taught himself to paint, concentrating his efforts on local wildlife and cage birds, imbuing his animals with a sprightliness he himself lacked. Being housebound may have been no bad thing for Lazarus, since plague was rampant and the local population was given to violent outbursts of both anti-Semitism and witch-hunting. Röting’s beautiful paintings reflect none of these troubles and are so accurate that we can safely assume they provide an honest record of what he saw. He painted several canaries, all of them typical wild, green birds – except for one that has white wings and a few yellow body feathers. Stresemann was convinced that this particular painting, completed around 1610, caught the very beginning of the canary’s transition from green to yellow.31
If Röting’s painting signalled the beginning, when was the process complete and the first all-yellow canary produced? Searching among the book collections of Berlin’s libraries, Stresemann made his first find: an article written in 1702 by Rosinus Lentilius, a physician from Nördlingen near Nuremberg in southern Germany, which describes white canaries as commonplace. Lentilius goes on to say that one particularly clever weaver boasted that he could breed canaries of any colour – but refused to reveal his secret.
Any colour? Tantalising, but too vague. Stresemann then came across a report of all-yellow canaries in the 1570s from Francisco Hernandez, chief physician to Philip II of Spain who had sent him to Mexico to document its natural resources. Hernandez said that the canaries in Mexico were tota lutea – all yellow – but Stresemann recognised immediately that this was a case of mistaken identity. These yellow birds were another species altogether. Eventually, closer to home Stresemann discovered the account by Lucas Schroeckius of Augsburg, another physician, who in 1677 described the first completely yellow canary. At this time such birds must have been scarce and so incredibly valuable that they were unknown in England and the likes of Samuel Pepys had to make do with green ones.32
Stresemann concluded that it had taken German fanciers sixty or seventy years – from Röting’s first flecks of yellow in 1610 to Schroeckius’s all-yellow birds of 1677 – to change the canary from green to yellow.
But this wasn’t the whole story. Paintings of part-yellow canaries were in existence some thirty years before those of Röting. They were included in a thirty-three volume encyclopaedia-cum-diary, Thesaurus Picturarum, produced by the Protestant cleric Marcus zum Lamm who was employed at the royal palace in Heidelberg. Lamm, a direct contemporary of Röting, devoted no less than three volumes to birds, each of which was illustrated in colour by unknown artists. There are four paintings of canaries, two wild green birds (which, Lamm noted, bred in captivity) and two birds with bright-yellow breasts, all thought to have been completed about 1580. Lamm says that these unfamiliar part-yellow canaries had come from Tyrol and that he was unsure how to categorise them. The very fact that Lamm had access to such birds confirms that, just as elsewhere, canaries were owned only by the aristocracy. The paintings he commissioned suggest that as early as the 1580s selective breeding among German enthusiasts was starting to produce interesting results. His extraordinary encyclopaedia has been one of Heidelberg University’s most treasured possessions ever since Lamm’s death in 1606. Stresemann got to hear about it through his student Ernst Mayr who was searching for historical records of the serin (a close cousin of the canary, which was expanding its range across Europe) as part of his doctoral studies. A young historian, Albrecht Schwan, drew their attention to Lamm’s encyclopaedia several years after Stresemann had written about Röting’s yellow-flecked canary. Schwan went on to study Lamm’s works for his own Ph.D., which he completed in 1926, but it was not until 2001 that the illustrations and other material in these volumes became generally available.33
Compared with the exquisite paintings by Röting, those in Lamm’s encyclopaedia are rather crudely executed, but the colours are extraordinarily brilliant. This is especially true of the yellow plumage on the two canaries. Intense yellow was a particularly difficult colour to achieve in Lamm’s time and the most readily available source of pigment came from the berries of plants such as buckthorn. It is no coincidence that the yellow pigments in the berries – substances called carotenoids – are the very same ones which in real life give canaries their yellow colour, the only difference being that carotenoids were even more effective in feathers than they were on paper.34
That partly yellow canaries existed by 1580 is clear from Lamm’s encyclopaedia, but it also turns out that there were entirely yellow canaries sooner than Erwin Stresemann or anyone else thought. The talented German bird artist Johann Walter painted entirely yellow and white canaries in 1657,35 twenty years earlier than those recorded by Lucas Schroeckius. Taken together, the pictorial records of Lamm and Walter indicate that it had taken around a century – one hundred canary generations and three generations of canary breeders – to complete the green-to-yellow transition. Had he lived long enough to learn about the discovery of Lamm’s and Walter’s canary paintings, Duncker would have been delighted; a century was exactly the kind of time-frame he imagined for the canary’s transition. Even Stresemann’s estimate of sixty to seventy years was reasonable. Duncker knew from his breeding experiments with Reich that the canary’s change in colour could not have occurred more rapidly.
In fact, the yellow canary could, in principle, have been produced almost at a stroke, exactly in the manner Davenport imagined, because this is precisely what happened with another bird. The green-finch, long a favourite cage bird in Britain, superficially resembles the wild canary in its colouring: a green bird with some grey, brown and yellow feathering. But a perfectly clear yellow greenfinch also exists, which bird keepers refer to as a ‘lutino’, a single gene mutation that, like the albino human, lacks any melanin whatsoever and has pink eyes. The only difference is that in the absence of melanin, the greenfinch’s ground colour is yellow rather than white. Very occasionally lutino greenfinches occur in the wild; they are very rare – perhaps less than one in a million – but as there are some 10–20 million pairs of greenfinches in Europe at any one time, seeing one is still somewhat more likely than winning the lottery. A lutino greenfinch is startlingly conspicuous and cage bird enthusiasts on seeing one would have made every effort to catch it. Owning one would have conferred status and breeding from it even more so. And that is exactly what happened. Lutino greenfinches were captured, paired with normal greenfinches and their offspring – which look exactly like normal greenfinches but carry the recessive lutino genes – were mated back to the lutino bird. In this way and with a great deal of patience, starting in the 1940s breeders captured the lutino genes and developed a strain of pure yellow greenfinches in a mere twenty years.36 The speed with which this was achieved was largely due to the existence of a completely yellow single gene mutation; but also, by the mid-1900s the understanding of inheritance was much greater than it was in the 1500s and 1600s when breeders were trying to create a yellow canary.
If a perfectly yellow mutation can arise spontaneously in the greenfinch, why couldn’t the same thing happen among wild canaries? The answer is that it could, but it didn’t, probably because compared with the greenfinch the world population of wild canaries is so small. With his incredible biological insight Darwin was well aware of this and wrote in the Origin of Species that the smaller the population, the less likely it was that ‘a well marked variety’, (like a lutino) will crop up. As far as anyone is aware, a wild yellow canary mutant has never been recorded. As a consequence bird enthusiasts had to produce yellow canaries the hard way.