Output Stream of Consciousness

Well, our canary called Gorbachev, anyhow. He's a fascinating little canary, all white except with a grey smoodge (as opposed to a smudge) on his head.

We went to Pisces to take a look at canaries. We were in luck that day, because they put out a number of canaries into the hall, many of them excellent singers.

It came down to a choice of two. One yellow who just belted out his song, and one white-with-a-smoodge who was slightly quieter but had a lovely song as well. It took a while to decide. In the end, the yellow fluffy guy lost out because we thought he might deafen us at some point :)

So we chose our white-n-grey canary, and they put him in a cardboard box for the journey to our place, and usually, pets are a little freaked out once they finally come out of there into their new home, but this little guy... no problem. Just hopped right out, hopped around his new environment, and started eating.

He made lots of peeps and chirps for days. We were wondering, though, if he was ever going to sing like he did in the store. They have a 4-day non-singing guarantee, where you can return a guaranteed singing canary at the end of four days if they don't sing. Well, he wasn't singing after four days. Some slightly longer chirping, but nothing like song.

We decided to hold onto him anyhow, at the very least since he was so personable. Well, a few days later, we were rewarded.

Here is a movie of Gorby singing. You may need to turn the audio up a little, since if we get too close, he gets too interested in us to sing, but this is representative of his pretty marvellous singing abilities. Enjoy.

UPDATE: Gorby passed away while we were on vacation, unfortunately. No real reason for his decline, as far as we know. The other birds in the cage seem fine. He is survived by Raisa who, while not up to Gorby's par in singing, a month later, she twitters and responds to us. We have yet to decide if we want to get a replacement companion, given how solitary canaries can be.