The males are in one half of the flight cage and the females in the other. There’s a wire partition between them. Mrs Cox says she watches the birds and when two birds show they love each other, she puts them into a breeding cage. Listening to her is like reading Gone With the Wind or something. She points out all the flirtings going on and which bird is after which; when you listen for a while, you begin to believe it.
Mrs Cox doesn’t use any breeding system. Her only rule is she won’t let brothers and sisters from the same nest mate; it’s in the Bible, she tells me. In her breeding cages she uses one male to a female. She thinks Mr Tate isn’t very nice the way he does it. She talks half of one whole afternoon just about that.
Mrs Cox and Mrs Prevost are friends. Mrs Cox recognized Birdie immediately as one of Mrs Prevost’s birds. Sometimes the two of them exchange birds to get new blood in the aviary. They’re a lot alike, except Mrs Cox is skinny.
Mrs Cox says I can leave Birdie in the female cage and visit whenever I want. If Birdie takes a fancy to one of her young males, she’ll sell him to me. It’s very nice of her but I don’t want to leave Birdie like that.
I come every Saturday and let Birdie fly around with the other females. A lot of the males come over next to the partition and sing to her, but there doesn’t seem to be any particular male she prefers. There’s one male I like myself; he has a green back and a yellow-green breast with white flight feathers on the outside. His head is flat and his legs are long. There’s a definite turn under his throat but I never see him sing. He flies very gracefully with much dignity. Mrs Cox says he’s a chopper; he sings very strongly but has some bad notes; these notes run in the family. His great-grandfather had been a roller but the rest of the family are choppers.
Mrs Cox tells me about another bird breeder named Mr Lincoln. He’s black and lives a square off Sixty-third Street on the other side of the park. She says he has all his birds in an upstairs bedroom in a row house. He’s married and has five children. He doesn’t do anything but raise birds and the whole family is on relief. Mrs Cox tells me all this in the same voice she talks about the birds and what they’ve done or haven’t done.
The first time I go to Mr Lincoln’s, he acts as if he doesn’t have any birds. It’s only after we’ve talked about birds a bit and he’s seen Birdie that he shows me three or four birds he has in a cage downstairs. We talked about them for a while and then he winks and tells me to follow him upstairs.
He’s fixed up a terrific aviary. The only trouble is it’s all inside and smells strongly of birds. He keeps it clean but with a couple hundred birds and no air, it gets smelly. He says he can’t screen and open the windows because of his neighbors. He’s afraid they might tell the relief people he has birds.
The birds are all in one room. One side is breeding cages and the other is flight cages. The door of the room opens onto a hall. He makes all his breeding cages by hand and paints them different colors according to his breeding plan. Color is what Mr Lincoln is interested in. He shows me the different projects he has. He experiments with breeding canaries to different kinds of birds to get new colors. He has some canaries he’s bred to linnets; they’re a nice buff red-orange with pale stripes. Other canaries he’s breeding to a little North African siskin; these are dark with bright red-orange breasts. He’s also breeding to something he calls an Australian fire finch. These come out with red heads and dark bodies.
Mr Lincoln talks about first crosses and second crosses and shows me birds he calls mules. He has to explain to me that a mule’s a bird who’s sterile. I don’t tell him I always thought a mule was a special kind of horse with long ears. He tells me most of his first crosses are mules. He says sometimes he has to breed ten times before he gets a fertile bird. The only way to check is by breeding.
Mr Lincoln has tremendous books with diagrams and drawings of his breeding charts. He explains line breeding to me. He has different special foods he’s developed to make birds want to mate. He says if a man ate any of that stuff he’d probably be able to breed with a bird himself. Mr Lincoln never says ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or stuff like that. It’s always ‘breed’ or ‘mate’ and ‘droppings’. Maybe it’s because I’m young or white but I don’t think so. Mr Lincoln doesn’t seem to mind my color much.
The main thing he’s trying to do is get an absolutely black canary bird. He says he wants one so black it’ll look purple. He says there’s a lot of black hidden in green birds and he’s trying to get it out. The way he does this is breed the greenest birds, the ones with the least yellow in them, to white birds. The first time they come out white or gray or spotty. He takes the darkest ones with spots and breeds them back to the dark green father or mother bird. He’s been line breeding back like that for nine years and some of his birds are blacker than street sparrows. There isn’t a yellow feather on them; the parts that are black are deep dull black and the lighter feathers are deep gray. Mr Lincoln shows me a feather he keeps in his wallet. He says when he has a whole bird as black as that, he can die happy. This feather must be from a crow or a blackbird, it’s that black.
The interesting thing is, his dark birds are such fine singers. Mr Lincoln couldn’t care less about this but most of the young males in the black cages are singing away, beautiful deep-throated rollers. Mr Lincoln says it’s ‘’cause us niggers is always singin’.’ Mr Lincoln doesn’t really talk that way at all. He smiles and looks at me closely when he says it.
He lets me put Birdie in the female flight cage. I can tell he doesn’t think much of Birdie as a bird; she’s just a dumb blonde to him, but he’s impressed with the way she lets me pick her up and handle her. He says he’s never seen a bird so tame and I must be good with birds. He says I can sit up there in his aviary and watch the birds all I want. I go there a lot and I watch Mr Lincoln cleaning and taking care of the cages as much as I watch the birds. His hands are sure and quick like birds themselves.
After a while, his wife starts inviting me to eat lunch with them. You can tell Mr Lincoln’s kids think he’s wonderful. He probably is. While I’m spending all this time at Mr Lincoln’s. I tell my mother I’m with Al. Al says he’ll cover for me. He wants to know if I’ve finally got a girlfriend but I tell him I’m going to watch birds in Philadelphia. I tell him about Mr Lincoln. Al says my mother will kill me if she catches on to where I’m going. He’s right.
Mr Lincoln says he won’t sell me any of the birds he has marked in his breeding charts, but he’ll sell me any of the others. There’s one bird I really like. I could watch him fly around all day and he knows I’m watching him. It’s the only canary bird I’ve met who comes over to the wire and tries to bite my finger.
This bird is constantly fighting with all the other males. That is, he’s trying to pick a fight. He’ll fly onto a perch and clear off everybody to the left and then everybody to the right. Then he’ll go to another perch and do the same thing. If he sees a bird at the food dish for more than a few seconds, he’ll swoop down on it like a hawk. I point him out to Mr Lincoln and he shakes his head. He says, ‘That’s one of the bad-blood ones.’
It turns out that in his breeding for black this one strain came through. It carries a lot of black in it, practically solid black but it’s all mixed in with yellow so they’re a deep green color. He says he’s tried everything to get that black separated out but finally had to give up. This is the last one of that strain. All the rest he’s sold off. He says the other thing is, the males in this bunch are meaner than bumblebees. They fight amongst themselves so much they practically kill each other off. They actually begin fighting before they get out of the nest. They fight the other birds until they either win or are half killed trying.
Mr Lincoln says they all came originally from a Hartz Mountain roller female, the daughter of a singing champion. Mr Lincoln bought her because she was so dark; he had to pay ten dollars for her five years ago. That’s a lot of money for a female, especially since she was six years old, sick, almost bald, and molting all the time. Mr Lincoln doctored her up, fed her some of his sex food and got two nests out of her before