Caruso, Mario and Madeline Join the Flock

A few weeks ago, the Society Finch I had named Priscilla – she, with Penelope, also named at the same time, were the only two left of the species in the house – died after a prolonged debilitating illness. While the two may not have been the closest of friends, they were pretty inseparable after a third bird died sometime in 2021.

Below is a cell-phone shot of last three that were left – I had maybe eight or nine of them at one point, I can’t recall – I used to call my “guard birds” sitting on top of the security panel for the alarm system, likely looking through the openings in the blinds covering the window atop the front door.

And below is a photo of Penelope on the left and Priscilla on the right. Penelope, or Penny for short, is distinguishable by her feather-picked neck. To be honest, I always imagined she would be the one to get sick, but she endures. (Apologies for the bad photos in this post but it’s harder to take pictures inside.)

When Priscilla finally died I felt sorry for Penny being the lone Society Finch in a sea of Zebra Finches. I started wondering if it was worth trying to find a few Society Finch housemates for her. It’s always dicey introducing new birds. You can’t expect them to bond with the one you have. Especially because of the age difference, I imagined it might be difficult. But I thought just having a new little Society Finch coalition of three might afford one out of the three that Penelope could take a liking to. At least she would feel not so quite alone.

So after my house guest’s departure, I started visiting pet stores. The first stop was not fruitful. The birds were pale and small, they didn’t look anything like Penny and there weren’t many to choose from. And like everything else, they were twice as expensive as the last ones I adopted years ago.

Even more expensive were the ones I found on Thursday, but there were many more to choose from, and they were mostly chocolate brown and white in color which was what I desired to complement Penny and make her more accepting of the newcomers. I was able to identify one singing immediately, even though I could barely hear it, I could tell he was singing and that’s the only way to distinguish males from females. So I told the young man who came to retrieve three birds from the cage for me that I definitely wanted the male.

As it turned out, I got two males and one female – that is, she is not singing. The males might even be brothers – they have nearly identical breast colorations that look like brown bibs. I guess the guy who caught them wanted to make sure I got the right one by retrieving them both.

The bird I immediately named Caruso is a fantastic singer, and his brother, Mario, is no slouch either. Caruso must have studied with canaries. Suffice it to say that there were a few canaries a couple small cages away, but when I got to the counter to complete my purchase, the young man at the register said he loved it when he worked on the night shift because the Society Finches were the best singers. I was also surprised when he said this, because none of my male Societies had ever sung like this before. I suspect I may have deprived him of that night-shift pleasure by purchasing these two.

I have a couple hastily-made recordings from the one day it was cool enough to turn off the fans in the house for a while so they wouldn’t interfere with the music. A few weeks ago I decided to learn some Manuel de Falla piano music after hearing some on the radio, so I bought a couple volumes and have started to work on a few pieces. Below is the Serenata Andaluza in its entirety along with noisy page turning as the binding on these volumes is very tight, and a segment of the Ritual Fire Dance which Caruso seems to enjoy immensely. You can also hear some Zebra Finch singing too but for the most part Caruso and perhaps Mario a bit too, are prominent with their trills and chirps. I am in heaven with these new musical collaborators.

Serenata Andaluza
Ritual Fire Dance – excerpt

Below is a photo of the female, possibly – on the first day when the birds were still confined to a cage. It will take me a while to figure out who’s who by sight as they all basically have the same coloring. While writing this post I decided to name her Madeleine. She can be Maddy for short.

Friday afternoon approximately 24 hours after I brought the new Societies home, I opened the cage door. It took them a while to figure that out. Saturday morning before I left for a rather long birding expedition I made sure the kitchen door was closed as that would be too much territory for them to explore in so short a time. After I got home Saturday, they were navigating the kitchen as well. Last night we did the living room cleanup which involves swapping out the dirty cages for clean ones brought up from the basement, vacuuming and replacing the papers under the cages. And then later last night I noticed that Penny had a companion with her in a hut – probably Mario – and was pleased that she had a new friend.

A word about Society Finches a/k/a Bengal Finches. They are a made-up species that would not otherwise exist save for the pet trade. I don’t know how I feel about that, except that maybe I can feel a little less guilty because the birds I bought were not snatched out of their wild habitat.

I hope to be back soon with a couple walks I went on over the weekend. I may not be going for as many walks as usual as my right knee is complaining loudly about all the recent activity, but that should give me time to write, right? I did go swimming today and still believe that is the best therapy for everything. Along with playing piano for great singers.

Zebra Finches

Fleeting Greetings of 2017

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Millennium Park Cardinal 12-30-16

This year is off to a slow start. I very much wanted to do a blog post honoring my indoor crowd which has been getting along fine, or so I thought. At least they seemed to be doing fine for a while.

Below is a short video I was able to capture in the gloom of the afternoon’s diminishing light just so I could isolate my Zebra Finch Arturo Toscanini singing his song, which starts with an arpeggio and goes from there. Below that you can hear him again before I start playing the Adagio to the Ravel Piano Concerto in G which may put you to sleep if you listen to the whole thing but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I went back to the Portage on New Year’s Day. It was much colder and sunnier than the week before and the birds were harder to find, but I counted as many species with a couple variations from last week’s list. All I have to show for it is ice and a distant Downy Woodpecker.

The birds in the backyard have returned to the feeders. I’m convinced the numbers of House Sparrows have fallen drastically, but they tend to fall off anyway in the winter. It was nice to see a couple Goldfinches and my own Downy Woodpeckers.

Before I went out birding, I chased Emerald Greenwald away from Dudlee’s latest nesting attempt (I gave in to Dudlee’s badgering me weeks ago and let her have the mug back but didn’t make it comfy for her) – not sitting down with myself long enough to figure things out, like the fact that Greenwald herself had approached reproductive age – and hoped for the best.

I came back to a bloody mess. Nobody had hatched but the eggs were broken open and bloody, nesting material the doves had accumulated themselves was everywhere, and Dudlee and Drew were looking the worse for wear.

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Emerald Greenwald, covered with evidence

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Drew and Dudlee, still in shock  – “How could you do this to us??!”

This has created a terrible silence. I don’t know when if ever Drew will start singing again. I had grown quite fond of his chiming in with any pretty music he heard on the radio all weekend. I like to imagine he might get over it but I don’t know if Dudlee will. To make matters worse, she seems to have a damaged right wing – it’s droopy. She was hiding in the kitchen last night, I’m sure she doesn’t feel safe anymore, even though without a nest I don’t think Greenwald is interested in bothering her. I may try to catch Dudlee and put her up in an infirmary cage for a few days, since she can’t fly very well anyway.

On a happier note, it’s always fun to watch a Society Finch tackle a piece of corn.

And there’s always time for a good bath in the pie plate.

I hope to be back soon on a happier note. Best wishes to everyone for a healthy new year. Whoever thought we’d make it to 2017? Stay tuned!

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Meanwhile Back at the Bungalow

Drew in the Kitchen Window

Drew looking out the Kitchen Window

No matter how distracted I may become by It All, and that’s amounted to Very Distracted Lately, there is always ongoing comedy/drama/opera relief going on at home.

Of course when it’s that rare sunny afternoon I’m home and able to sneak a picture or two of the indoor crowd, invariably we haven’t cleaned yet. So what few pictures I have here are cropped as much as possible…

A while ago I decided to buy the music to the Ravel Piano Concerto in G, simply to learn the adagio so it wouldn’t make me cry every time I heard it. In any event it’s a nice piece for the birds to chime in on. Drew likes it. You can hear him singing along in the beginning of the clip below. Arturo Toscanini, a Zebra Finch, sings one of his many songs before the music starts, and there’s also a lot of bathing going on which translates into sounds of water spraying everywhere.

Dudlee on the back door curtain rod

Dudlee on the back door curtain rod

Drew and Dudlee have become friendlier and they hang out together, but she still has somewhat of a crush on Mr. Green (Jeremy Casanova Green) the Budgie who still wants to be a Zebra Finch and spends much of his time imitating Zebra Finch chatter, chasing Zebra Finch girls and sweet-talking the hens when he can corner one of them.

Getting a young budgie female for Mr. Green did not work out. In fact, sadly, Bianca disappeared over a month ago and I have not yet found her. I suspect she was not well or sufficiently feisty enough to fit in with the crowd, as she spent longer than usual (days) inside the cage she was in, too timid to come out even though the door was open after the first day or so and everyone else was going in and out. Mr. Green did finally show her the ropes but didn’t pay a lot of attention to her, and she was quite reticent. While I don’t think the other birds did anything to her, I suspect she made sure she would not be found by them or me.

I am not going to repeat the experiment. At first I thought another green budgie, or even two, might persuade Mr. Green to identify with his own species, but I have decided the older the birds get, the harder it is to change things. If Mr. Green identifies with the Zebra Finches, so be it. It’s my fault, however unintentional. I can cut Mr. Green some slack and say I’m not sure the chasing is all his idea as the Zebra Finches do quite enough of it among themselves. So we will continue as a dysfunctional family.

Mr. Green

Mr. Green

If I can ever get Arturo Toscanini to sing his full-throated repertoire like he does when I’m not recording him, I will put a recording in a future post. He has evolved from one little song into about four or five and when he strings them all together and does variations on the themes it’s quite impressive.

Zebra Finches

Zebra Finches

One more picture below of Drew in the kitchen window. His eye-ring is wider than Dudlee’s and his primary tail feathers are longer, I am sure to enable his fantastic displays. Which he does quite elaborately from time to time, trying to impress the Zebra Finch females (I guess he picked this up from Mr. Green).

Drew at the back window

Drew at the back window

The Society Finches are still with us but somewhat harder to photograph. I never dreamed they would be intimidated by Zebra Finches who are smaller than they are.

So it’s back to the drawing board for that world peace model… 🙂

 

 

Four New Societies

Society Finch kids

Society Finch kids

I came home from work Friday night ready to do the usual cleanup and was surprised to find these guys all sitting on top of the nest box, looking definitely as big as their parents, if clueless.

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There are four of them – unfortunately due to circumstances beyond my control it’s hard to tell them apart at the moment.

Below is a little sample of what they sound like when they’re begging for food. There was some guitar music on the radio, in the background. There’s also a little Pietro Zebra Finch mixed in there too.

So as far as I can tell, two of them appear darker than the darkest adult, Phoenix, and one of them is close to Hector’s coloring.

Phoenix

Phoenix

There is another parent, I suspect – Rikki – but she would not pose for a picture. However one of the offspring has a pink bill, taking after her.

Hector

Hector

While the nestlings were still in the nest it was practically impossible to record their begging songs. The moment they sensed I was paying attention, like good little birds they immediately shut up.

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Somehow the youngsters have not inherited the punk hairstyles. Maybe that comes later.

While I was waiting to record the babies begging, I managed to get some of Zorro’s song for his followers, a little solo song – with the radio instead of the piano in the background.