More than ten years have passed since I started writing The Red Canary. That book was the culmination of something I had been thinking about for decades, but it also led to the development of something new. I have always been fascinated by birds, and have been lucky to be able to convert that passion into a scientific career. As a boy I went to Leeds Market on Saturday mornings to look at the rows of caged foreign birds, and occasionally bought some to keep in the aviary my father had built for me. An aviary was an excellent way of getting close to birds: it allowed me to watch them more intimately than I could ever achieve with wild birds. Their colourful plumage, extraordinary song and intriguing behaviour fired my juvenile imagination.
My interest in birds eventually became an obsession, and I suspect that my parents began to wonder whether their encouragement had misfired. The truth is that the hours that I spent studying both captive and wild birds paid off. That was my ornithological apprenticeship, though I was almost entirely self-taught. It has been suggested that to become expert requires 10,000 hours of practice. I spent many more hours than that watching birds as a boy, and it was this that eventually enabled me to get a job as a university lecturer and study birds for a living.
The Red Canary was an excuse to revisit my childhood and to explore the culture of bird keeping. In the 1960s the keeping of cage-birds was in decline, but still widespread – numerous birds were still advertised for sale in the weekly newspaper Cage and Aviary Birds. Much of my scientific research over the years has been conducted on the zebra finch, one of the most popular of cage birds. I have studied them in the wild in their native Australia, but also in captivity where they obligingly reproduce throughout the year. As a consequence I got to know many zebra finch breeders, some of whom were incredibly knowledgeable and helpful. They piqued my interest: what was it that generated their passion for bird breeding? How come these old men – for that’s what almost all bird-keepers were – knew so much that I, as a professional ornithologist, didn’t know? In some ways this was swampy ground, because bird-keeping is increasingly considered non-PC, and my scientific colleagues were often appalled at the idea that I would fraternise with those who they considered dubious company. Undeterred, I began to wonder whether ornithologists had missed a trick by avoiding and ostracising bird-keepers.
These ideas rattled around in my head for years, and almost subconsciously I began to search for a hook on which to arrange and develop them. Then, on a whim in the mid 1990s, I looked at a small book by A.K. Gill on canaries, written in the 1950s. Flipping through its pages in a second-hand book shop, I was shocked at Gill’s literacy. Most books on bird keeping were poorly written, but this one was different. Gill was a librarian with a passion for canaries, including one I had never even heard of, a red canary. I was hooked.
The history of research on the red canary, described in the pages that follow, opened up a new world for me. Perhaps most importantly, it made me realise that the scientific study of birds began with bird-keepers in the mid 1600s. That led to a wider interest in how we know what we know about birds, and eventually resulted in the publication of The Wisdom of Birds (Bloomsbury, 2008), Bird Sense (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin (Princeton University Press, 2014).
Scientists get their inspiration from a wide variety of sources. Darwin, for example, maintained a voluminous correspondence with naturalists and animal breeders, joined two London pigeon clubs, and thought through his ideas by walking round the wood at the bottom of his garden. My first serious meeting with bird fanciers, described on page six, was part of my research for this book, and was both a cultural and scientific shock. A bird keeper told me something that led to several years of research and a succession of scientific publications. The idea that I could be inspired by events well outside my normal day-to-day life was both enlightening and exciting. Imagine then, how I felt when I discovered that the red canary was the offspring of a collaboration between Hans Duncker – a scientist and Karl Reich – a bird-keeper, in the 1920s.
The Red Canary is the story of this extraordinary collaboration – a partnership that generated scientific discoveries and eventually a brand new bird – the red canary.