On the bottom of this page you will find one article taken from a previous copy of the DRC News. From time to time a new article will appear as a free sample of what we offer to our subscribers. The DRCA executive and its members hope that you will enjoy this sample and we encourage you to participate by sharing your thoughts or comments amongst our many subscribers. Please email drca@shaw.ca . Full consideration will be given towards having your words published in an upcoming issue. The following titles of previous sample articles once provided precede the current article. From time to time some of the best articles are reprinted for our subscribers.
- January with your Rollers
- Female's Influence on the Roller Canary Song
- More About Female Roller Canaries
- April With Your Rollers
- Selecting for Breeding Stock
- 2003 DKB Deutche Meisterchaft, Munster, Germany
- Strain Breeding Roller Canaries
- Canary Breeding in the Lowlands
- Perfecting the Youngsters in the Flight
- Songs are Slowly Getting Faint
Roller Canary Items for April and May
Edited by Bill Friend
The breeding season for birds living in their natural environment, out of doors, starts in the spring. In the Northern Hemisphere, the first day of spring is the Spring Equinox which is comprised of equal day and night hours; this year falling on March 20th. So spring in 2004 is from March 20th to June 20th. Let's just round them off to April, May, and June.
As the seasons cycle from winter to spring, the number of sunlight hours increase, the temperatures get warmer, and the natural foods sprout, grow, and become plentiful. These are all the prerequisite conditions required to stimulate the birds' energy and fertility cycle. However, the outside spring does not allow you adequate time to get your youngsters moulted, matured, trained, and in full song, ready for the Song Contests which generally start in November. As a result you must advance the natural spring three months ahead to the January to March period. Additionally you must have done all the right things for your birds for at least 4 months ahead of this time to have them maintained in excellent condition. If they are not, you shouldn't consider advancing the season until they are. However, if they are, start making the necessary changes to get them into perfect breeding condition.
Very gradually, you adjust the daylight, warmth, and food. You increase the daylight hours to 13 hours by providing artificial light in the early morning hours. Do not extend the artificial light into the evening, as the hen and babies must have a normal sunset. At the same time you utilize an electric heater to maintain the temperature within the range of 68°/70° Fahrenheit. You also adjust the diet to include more nourishing food, which I will discuss later in this article. So now you have light, heat, and food all adjusted to bring the spring into your breeding room. Everything is happening as it should, because you made these changes gradually, and at the same time taking note of your birds' energetic 'breeding-activities' development.
Let's just quickly summarize what your routine has been up to this point-in-time. You reviewed your show results from the past season and your Inbreeding program. You carried out your planned adjustments of light, heat, and food, and finalized your planned pairings. Then, when the hens were shredding paper, and flipping their wings; and the cocks were singing to the hens and flipping their wings they were paired up in the breeding cages. The best way to do this is to put each of the cocks you have selected for breeding, into their own breeding cage. A few days or a week later, when they have got used to the cage and are singing to the hens, put the hens selected for breeding in with the cocks. The reason you follow this procedure, is to give the cocks time by themselves to recover from the strains endured in the small show cages and to establish the breeding cage as their territory. Additionally, the hens will tend to be more subdued and submissive when they are introduced into the cock's territory instead of the other way around. Less fighting will be the result.
By April and May, you are well into your breeding season, and you know whether you are having a poor, fair, or good year. If you have done everything right since the previous breeding season, you will be getting rewarded with many successful nests, and enjoying great pleasures as a result. If you started with 3 to 4 cocks and 10 to 12 hens, all in excellent condition, it would be quite possible for you to raise 100 youngsters. Providing you are inbreeding, and providing your cock to hen ratio is favorable, you could have 3 to 4 really good teams to raise and train for the upcoming shows. Note the following information:
Inbreeding: There are three basic types of Inbreeding. The first one is linebreeding, which calls for breeding father to daughter and mother to son. The second is breeding brother to half-sister, and sister to half-brother. The third is any combination of the other two.
Blood Refreshment: If you find faults and hardness are showing up in your birds' song, and you suspect that the decisions you made regards Inbreeding and selections are failing, then you may benefit by adding blood refreshment into your strain. When you do this, keep only the resulting female youngsters. Do not keep any of the young cocks. Also maintain your own pure strain at the same time, until you find a successful blood refresher.
More Nourishing Food: It is often said that in order to get your birds into Breeding Condition, you must give them more nourishing food. This means that you change their diet by increasing their protein intake with egg food, increasing their intake of vitamin E with hulled sunflower seed, and coating their regular seeds with wheat germ oil. These are in addition to their regular seed diet of Canary, Rape, Flax, and Niger (Inga); also small amounts of treat seeds once or twice per week. Natural Bee Pollen is another great food to use.
Green Foods: There are many green foods suitable for canaries. Some of these are leaf lettuce, romaine, chicory, spinach, broccoli florets, broccoli stems (halved), chickweed, curly endive, kale, cabbage, dandelion, and collard (variety of kale.) Let me remind you of important precautions that must be taken. When you are gathering greens from your garden or fields; ensure that fungicides, insecticides, or toxic chemicals have not been used in their cultivation, and always wash the greens really well before feeding them to your birds. Incidentally, they love aphids.
When to Feed Green Foods: The rule that it is essential for your birds to receive washed, fresh greens throughout the year is a good one. However, there are two times that this rule should not be followed. When the hens are setting the eggs, the greens should be substantially reduced, and when you have babies in the nest, no green food whatsoever should be fed until the babies are pushing their excreta over the side of the nest. This is usually when they are 5-6 days old. If you do not heed these two exceptions, you will suffer losses.
Sprouted Canola Rape Seed: Although some fanciers use it, and some don't, I have never heard of any creditable evidence against the use of sprouted rape seed. Perhaps some fanciers are misled by false information that says sprouting rape reduces its nutrition. Actually, it is an excellent green food, as the nutrition is increased when sprouted into young plants; it helps the youngsters to start eating on their own, and parallels what the birds eat in your garden. You must remember though that it is essential you rinse it well each day to prevent it going sour, and it must always be kept in the fridge. You can also sprout a seed mixture as follows: 2 of canary, 1/3 of flax, 1/3 of Niger (Thistle, Inga), 4 of Rape (Canola), 2 of Sunflower (black), and 2 of Wheat. Just make enough to last several days. You can also grind unsprouted seeds in a mill, using care with the Rape, Niger, and Flax as they are oily.
Removing Eggs from the Nest: Nested hens lay one egg per day, for as many as six days. However, the normal range is from three to five. It is essential that all the babies be hatched on the same day so they will all stand the same height, all will be equally fed, and all will have an equal chance of survival, along with vigorous growth. To attain this, you remove the newly laid eggs from the nests each morning, and hold them in containers numbered to match the breeding cages. Do not use small containers half full of seed; one of the seeds can get caught between your finger and the egg, popping a hole through the shell, thereby destroying the egg. I experienced this myself on one occasion, so it can happen. Check the number of eggs in each holding container every evening, and were there are three eggs being held, return them to the nest. Now, when the hen resets the nest to lay the fourth egg, she will stay on the nest, and all four should hatch very close to the same time. If there is a fifth egg, it would probably hatch a day later.
Linda Hogan said it well when she said, "Successful breeding requires a good nutritional diet throughout the year, special conditioning during the two months prior to breeding, and extra supplementation during breeding."
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