c Allgemeine and Spezielle Zoologie. Zoologische Sammiung. ... by the physician Lucas Schroeckius from Augsburg in 16 77. On the basis of this e\·idence.
Archil'l'S o/11at11ral histo1:r 31 ( 1): 50-56. 2004
© T. R. Birkhead. K. Schulze-Hagen & R. Kinzelbach
Domestication of the canary, Serinus canaria - the change from green to yellow · T. R. BIRKHEAD''. K. SCHULZE-HAGEN 8 and R. KINZELBACW ' Department of Animal and Plant Sciences. University of Sheffield. SheftielJ. S 10 2TN. UK. Bergerstrasse 163. D-..J.1068 Mönchengladbach. Germanv. c Allgemeine and Spezielle Zoologie. Zoologische Sammiung. Institut für Biodiversi@sforschung. Universi@splatz 2. 18055 Rosto.Iaximilian SforLa by Aelius Donatus. illustrated by Gio\;mni Pidro da Birago in i\lilan between l..J.96 and l-+99. The bird~ may or may not be yellow canaries. Figures 1 and 2 sho\\. the birds in more detail (frorn Walther and Wolf. 2001 ). Figures 4 and 5. Lamm"s partially yellow canaries (Figure 5. with a cresu. painted around 1580 (from Kinzelbach and Hölzinger. 2000J. Figures 6 and 7. \\'alter"s all-yellow bircl (Figure 7). which may or may not be a canary. and his \\hite canary (Figure 6) paintecl around 1657 (frnm Anonymous. 199..+: reproduced with permission from the Albertina Museum. Vienna).
DOMESTICATION OF THE CANARY
53
Similis /wie esr. ut audio, Canaria dicra auicula. quae e Canarjs insu!is sacchariferacibus aduehitur. suauissimi CQllfllS.
[Similar to the latter. as I hear, is a small bird named Canaria which from the Canary Islands is carried to us with the transpons of sugar; his songs are very lovely.]
This canary is a greenish bird. similar to Citrinella. Its frequent name "sugar bird" refers to the mode of transportation. In the next sentence Gessner wrote: Auicula aurea. uccello d'oro. ab lralis dicirur. auicula parua instar citrine//ae, er admodum canora, aureo pectoris colore. 1111de et aureola dici posset Latine, ex ltalia ad Germanos adferrw: [The bird is called uccello d'oro by the Italians. a tiny little bird resembling the Citrinella and rather songful. with a golden breast. therefore it might be named aureola in Latin: it is brought from ltaly to the Germans.]
Gessner's last sentence of the three referred to the Serin and is not quoted here. Gessner's description appears to be of a partially yellow canary ''with a golden breast" which also merits a special narne, "uccel/o d'oro'' (golden bird), indicating that the Italians may have been selectively breeding canaries at this time. Note, however, that Gessner's information on canaries was all second-hand. He never saw a canary in ltaly and obtained at least some of the information for his account from two educated citizens of Augsburg: Gottfried Seiler who apparently sent Gessner a drawing of a canary, although Gessner did not use it in his book. and Raphael Seiler, Gottfried's brother, who sent Gessner a poem on the canary. which was used later by AldrO\·andi ( 1599) (see also Gessner, 1555). If selective breeding of canaries occurred in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it is rather curious that there is no explicit mention of captive breeding in the early accounts of Manzini ( 1575), Valli da Todi ( 1601 ). Olina ( 1622), or in Battaglia 's ( 1962) Grande di::.ionario del/a /i11g11a ltaliana. ~fore convincing e\·idence for the start of the domestication process comes from paintings completed around 1580 in an unpublished 33-volume encyclopaedia-rnm-diary produced by the German Protestant cleric Marcus zum Lamm ( 1544-1606) and described in detail only in 2000 (see Kinzelbach and Hölzinger, 2000). Lamm devoted no fewer than three volumes to birds. attracti\'ely. if somewhat crudely illustrated by several unknown artists. There are two paintings of wild-type canaries ("canari vögelin") . which Lamm stated bred in captivity in Heidelberg. but there are also two pictures of canaries with !arge and distinctive patches of yellow plumage on their ventral surface (Figures 4 and 5) which possibly came from Tyrol - then an important centre of canary breeding (Parsons, 1987). Lamm also stated that he was not familiar with these yellow colour variations, not naming them and placing them tentatively near pictures of the yellowhammer, Emberi::.a citrine/la, which is hardly surprising since they must have been extremely rare. At this time canaries were owned exclusively by the aristocracy (Parsons, 1987). Interestingly, one of the two yellow and green canaries also bears an indication of a crest and probably represents the earliest record of the crest mutation in the canary, previously thought to date from the late l 700s (Buffon, 1793). The illustrations in Lamm ·s volurne put the first signs of yellow plumage in the canary about 20 years earlier than Stresemann's ( 1923b) estimate based on Röting's painting. We have also found an earlier date for the appearance of what might be a pure yellow canary than Stresemann 's 1677 reference to Schroeckius. The artist Johann Walter ( 16041677), who lived in Strassburg (Strasbourg), illustrated a range of exotic cage-birds in 1657 (Anonymous, 1994 ). One of these is labelled as a canary ("Serinus siu [sie.] Canari Vogel") and is yellow on the face, ventral surface and rump, with white wings and tail (Figure 6). The earliest previous reference to white canaries came from an Augsburg physician, Schroeckius
54
DOMESTICr\TIO:--.: OF THE CANARY
in 1667 (in Stresemann, l 923a): by 1700 white canaries were reported to be commonplace in Germany (Stresemann. 1923a). The other bird ( Figure 7) is a uniform deep rich yellow in colour. with slightly darker wings. and the text on the painting reads: „Pafser jfaiws ex /lf.frio mifsus·· which translates as the yellow sparrow (meant as little bin.l) sent from Illyria ( which is the Adriatic side of the Balkans: Dalmatia and Albania). There is no native all-yellow passerine from that region. The location makes it unlikely that it is one of the all-yellow finches of the genus Sicalis from South America which were sometimes kept as cage birds. Another possibility is that the bird is a colour mutation of a nati\·e tinch taken frorn the wild. although if it were. say. a lutino greenfinch (see below). then it woulu have had red rather than dark eyes. The final possibility is that really was an all-yellow canary. The Slovenians. sometimes referred to as lllyrians. played an important role as suppliers of the rich bird market in south-eastern Germany ( narnely Augsburg). as did the French from the Pyrenees for the Strassburg bird markets. The Slovenian bird traders were responsible for creating the recent German name for the serin. Serinus scrinus. ··girliu" (previously. ··grillic'"). This suggests that they exported the serin (as weil as its nornenclature). possibly making it more likely that Walter's illustration is of a rnutant all-yellow serin rather than a canary. The information we present here suggests that the canary may h~m:.~ been subject to artificial selection for longer than pre\·iously assumed. On the basis of Röting"s painting. Stresemann ( l 923a) identified what he thought might be the start of the domcstication around 1610. Howe\·er. the possible presence of completely yetlow birds in the l-+90s !Figures 1. 2 and 3) indicates that selective breeding rnay have srarteJ much earlier since Duncker ( 1928) showed that as colour is a polygenic trait the transition from the green \\·ild type binJ would probably have taken several decades. Ho\ve\·er. a yellow canary could in principle. have arisen spontaneously anJ/or been produced very rapidly and exactly in the manner o~n·enport imagined. This is precisely what happened with the greenfinch. Carduelis ch/oris. which has long been a fornurite cage bird and is superficially similar to the wild canary in its colouring. A pure yello\\' mutation of the greenfinch exists. referred to by aviculturalists as a lutino. This is a single gene. sex-linked recessive mutation that completely suppresses the production of mdanin. The lutino greenfinch has pink eyes and the absence of melanin renders the ground colour of its plumage yellow. Lutino greenfinches occasionally occur in the wild. and using a small number of these wild-caught birds aviculturalists established this mutation in a mere 20 years between 19..+0 and 1960 (Lancier and Partridge. 1998). There is an estimated l 0-20 million pairs of greenfinches in Europe at the present time ( BirdLife. 2000) and the lutino mutation occasionally arises by chance. The wild canary population on the other hand is much smaller and comprises no more than 160,000 pairs (BirdLife. 2000) and as far as is known. a pure yellow mutation has never been recorded among wild birds. However, there is no reason why a lutino rnutant should not have occurred among wild canaries, but its relatively small population size makes it inherently less likely than in the greenfinch. Interestingly. in the mid- l 960s the lutino mutation (also known as an "ino" or "satinette": a sex-linked recessive mutation) appeared among domestic canary stock and has since become one of the many established colour variants of the domestic canary (Walker and Avon, 1987). lt is possible that the completely yellow canaries (if that is what they are) in Italy in the 1490s were lutino birds taken from the wild. lf there \Vere completely yellow canaries as early as the l 490s, why did they remain rare for so long? There are several possibilities. First, if the birds in Figure l, 2 and 3 were wild caught lutinos it is unlikely at that date
DOMESTICATION OF THE CANARY
55
that they could have been used to form a strain of yellow canaries. Second, it is known that for several centuries after their appearance on mainland Europe canaries were kept only by the aristocracy. Referring to the canary Gessner ( 1555) stated "lt is sold everywhere very dear. both for the S\veetness of its singing. and also because it is brought from far remote places with great care and diligence, and but rarely, so that it is wont to be kept only by nobles and great men." The canary was a bird of status, and a yellow canary would have been a particularly potent status symbol. and even if they could breed them consistently it would have paid breeders to keep them scarce, much as diamonds are regulated today. One consequence of such scarcity is that completely yellow birds would have been extremely \'Ulnerable to chance extinction. This is even more likely to be true if they \Vere selectively bred and maintained by inbreeding. as seems likely (Robson. 1911 ). Other distinct and apparently well cstablished canary colour mutations. like the '"London Fancy„ which was popular in the mid l 800s. have gone extinct in more recent times through chance events (Robson. 191 l: Walker and Arnn. 1987).
CONCLUSION In conclusion. the all yellow birds in the painting from the l-l-90s may or may not be canaries: if they are it is not clear \\hether they were wild caught lutinos. or whether they were the pro
