The Canary Handbook

by Matthew M. Vriends

This most popular songbird among pet owners comes in a wide range of colors and varieties. Here is detailed information on canary housing, feeding, and general care. Books in this series are designed and illustrated much like Barron's Pet Owner's Manuals, but have more pages, even more photos, and more fully detailed pet care advice and instruction. Pet owners and people who plan to acquire a pet will find information on health care, feeding, and housing--and where applicable, on grooming and training. All photos are top quality and in full color. Many of the titles in this series also feature instructive line illustrations.

167 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2001

About the author

Matthew M. Vriends Ph.D.

Reviews

[Laura Hamadi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Canary Handbook has some wonderful, basic information for novice aviculturists. To give you my background, I have raised canaries and finches for 6 years and my husband for 20+, so we have a little bit of experience. As with any information or self-help book, everything has to be taken with a grain of salt. This author has a lot of opinions, some of them contradictory to what we have learned and found with out birds.

The book has a section about common diseases of canaries, how to treat them, and how to prevent them. This is a good stepping stone, but we have found that as long as you keep the cages clean, bathe them regularly, and feed a balanced diet, disease can be prevented.

There's a whole 2 sections of this book dedicated to type canaries, breeding, and genetics. For the person who is just looking for canaries as recreational pets for pleasure, this will not interest you at all. However, for the person who is wanting to breed their canary, these sections are a good scratching of the surface in how to do so. Being that I've never been interested in this (only having canaries for pleasure), I actually learned some new and fascinating information.

Being a nurse, I always learned through my various classes in school that males have XY sex chromosomes and females have XX, therefore each person inherits an X from their mother and the father determines the sex of the baby. This is exactly the opposite for birds! Male canaries are XX and female canaries are XY, therefore the female determines the sex of each baby. When I first encountered this passage, I thought, "Hmm, the author/publisher has made a mistake!" But after researching, I found out this is accurate. You learn something new every day! Here are some links if anyone else finds themselves in a similar state of disbelief:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-...
http://www.brighthub.com/science/gene...

[Ig-88 · Rating 2 out of 5]

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