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Color From a Cage

For most of us, the word canary brings to mind just one color—bright yellow. But the ancestors of today's fair songsters, which are native to the Canary, Madeira, and Azores islands, are anything but. In the wild, Serinus canaria, or island canaries, are a much drabber olive green or grayish-brown color than their caged brethren. In fact, the small, sweetly singing finches are difficult to spot because their coloring helps keep them hidden among the leaves.

The canary's color transformation is a tale of breeding that dates back to the 15th century, when Spaniards conquered the Canary Islands (which were named by Roman historian Pliny the Elder for the large wild dogs—or canis in Latin—that lived there, rather than for the native birds). Canaries were originally trapped and caged for their beautiful song, and there are two theories about how they made their way to Europe. One postulates that the Spanish invaders sent regular shipments of the birds back to the mainland, maintaining a monopoly on the market early on by selling only male birds. Eventually, however, females became available and captive canary breeding spread swiftly throughout Europe. The other theory is that in the early 16th century, a merchant ship traded with the Canary Islands and picked up a load of canaries, then wrecked off the island of Elba. A sailor released the caged creatures, but some were recaptured and sent to Italy as songbirds, and from there spread throughout Europe.

What the records do make clear is that by the 17th century canaries were being bred in Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, and southern Germany. As the practice grew, breeding for qualities other than song—such as color and posture—also became popular, triggering the canary's change from dull green to what has become known as canary yellow. Like dogs, many breeds of canaries have been developed from their wild ancestors, and today these breeds are classified as song, type, or color canaries.

Wild canaries have four color pigments—two brown, one black, and one yellow. The brown and black pigments color the centers, edges, and undersides of the feathers. They are known as melanins and are formed from proteins produced by the birds' bodies. The yellow pigment, which forms a base of color on the feathers, comes from a fat-soluble material called lipochrome that is derived from the birds' diet, which includes grass seeds and weeds. The combination of the dark melanin pigments superimposed on the yellow lipochrome background gives wild canaries their green color.

However, the proportion of dark and light pigments in a bird's body is mostly determined by genes. One set of genes controls where the pigments will appear on the feathers, while another set determines which color will be displayed. Over the years, as breeding became a popular hobby in Europe and the canaries were bred with other songbirds, some of the genes controlling pigment patterns mutated, changing the way the melanins were displayed. The birds with mutated color genes were selectively bred; with each generation, less of the dark pigments showed, and more of the yellow background color was revealed. The end result is the canary yellow (and sometimes white, blue, red, or cinnamon) birds found in pet stores today.

—Emily Huhn

link toBack to main story, The Canaries: Invaded Isles of Wonder

ZooGoer 34(2) 2005. Copyright 2005 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.

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