Birdy

doesn’t know any more than I do. We all have our own private kinds of craziness. If it gets in the way of enough people, they call you crazy. Sometimes you just can’t take it anymore yourself, so you tell somebody else you’re crazy and they agree to take care of you.

Since the mating, Alfonso is less hostile toward me. I wouldn’t say he’s friendly, but there’s a form of truce. Actually, to be honest, he more or less ignores me. I don’t know what Birdie told him, or how much canaries can get across that kind of thought, but he accepts the idea I’m not going to hurt him.
    The nest building proceeds quickly now. They’re up and down, in and out, all day. Alfonso is allowed to help with the carrying but he isn’t to put anything in the nest. Birdie has definite ideas about how things should be done. He’ll come up with some burlap and she’ll take it out of his beak. Apparently, Alfonso only has the concept, he doesn’t have the skills to build.
    When I come in to peer at the nest, Birdie makes no fuss and seems proud of herself. She isn’t exactly weaving the little strings, but she’s overlapping them carefully in such a way that it makes a compact, formed mass. Alfonso isn’t so happy about me sticking my nose into things. He stands on top of the cage while I peer in, and gives me his most threatening look. Birdie’s shaping the nest as a deep hole somewhat smaller than her breast dimension and turning it in slightly to close at the top. The inside is shaped like the hole for a small vase. Tuesday night I can see it’s finished.
    On Wednesday, when I come home from school, I’m shocked to see the entire nest torn apart and strewn over the floor of the aviary. Holy God, what next! it’s enough to drive a person batty. The new nest is under construction. She’s more frantic this time. I think if Alfonso didn’t feed her once in a while she’d starve. It’s up anddown, back and forth; carefully picking the right pieces out of the piles; flying up; placing them even more carefully in the nest. Each time she takes a moment’s snuggling to check dimensions and then goes out again. I can’t even guess what could’ve been wrong with the first nest. She makes poor Alfonso work like a slave. He’s getting no creative satisfaction out of the thing but she forces him. He’s playing hod carrier to her bricklayer. Twice, I see him fly up to his favorite top perch to do a little singing and take a rest. Birdie chases after him and forces him back to the grind.
    This time, as she comes to finishing the nest, she starts fraying the individual threads into light brown fuzz. With this she lines the bottom of the nest and the upper ramparts. It’s beautiful. Then, apparently, even this isn’t soft enough, so she starts chasing Alfonso around the cage, snitching feathers from his breast. The first few times he lets her get away with it, but then he’s had enough. When she makes another pass at him, he gives her a couple good pecks on the head and chases her around the aviary till she flies back into the small cage and settles onto the nest. He flies in after her, goes over and feeds her on the nest. She stays there while he sings the soft, tender song he sang the first night I heard him. I know from the song that the nest is finished.
    Canaries living in a cage are like human beings in that they’re not living a completely natural life. They have a life which is safer than natural life would be. For this reason, they don’t get enough physical challenge and experience in survival. Also, birds, which in nature would die, are kept alive by the bird breeder because he has other interests than survival, such as color or song or special shape or something else. Gradually, the cage bird loses much of its vitality, its capacity to survive.
    For example: in nature, a bird lays her first egg and is so busy providing herself with food and protecting her territory, she usually doesn’t start sitting the egg right away. She waits until she has a full clutch before she begins bearing down and really brooding. A cage bird, however, has a different situation. She’s so anxious and so confined to the area of the nest, she starts sitting tight as soon as an egg is laid. This means, if there are four eggs laid, the firstbird is hatched four days before the last. Four days is a big difference in baby birds and the big one gets all the food and stomps over the little ones, so they don’t have much chance. For