Free The Birds

I never had pets when my children were young. Whoops, I forgot about the giant african snails. Hmmmm... whatever happened to them? They lived on my kitchen windowsill for years in a glass box. The children diligently fed them for about the first two days and I fed them for the next two years until they died. I wondered how many years they would have lived in Africa - more than two, less than two - who knows?



Moving on from the giant african snails, I waited a year or two and after jealously coveting my neighbours canaries through the front room window for a while, I coincidentally was offered two canaries from a work colleague who was clearing out their avary. I couldn't believe my luck! I bought a beautiful cage for them and when they arrived in their cardboard box, carefully opened them up. A beautiful pure yellow canary flew out of the box, hit the wall of my front room and fully unconscious slipped down the back of the radiator. It was a difficult moment particularly as the bird breeder was still in the house. The canary made a full recovery.

Its playmate was another canary except it looked more like a green sparrow but I was assured it was a canary and that some canaries are green with stripes... I had my doubts!

After a couple of days in the cage, I realised that the canaries weren't really singing much and to be honest, I also started feeling sorry for them sat in a cage all day so opened the door for them to fly out and do whatever comes naturally to canaries, which appeared to be depositing bird pooh as much as possible in as many different places as possible.

I then went out to do the shopping safe in the knowledge that I had closed all the windows so they couldn't fly out with the obvious exception of the bathroom window because I was sure that canaries could not fly upstairs - how would a canary know what stairs were?

So the first canary flew out of the bathroom window - it was the beautiful butter yellow one. I mentioned it to a neighbour who calmly told me not to bother looking for it because the local sparrow hawks would have eaten it within a couple of minutes.

The other canary seemed happier now its mate had gone and we called him Bert for which I apologise if he was a girl. I decided to let him fly around the house all the time because I hated seeing him locked up in a little cage - and after a while he used to sit on the worktops while I was cooking and I made him a little wooden island in the kitchen on the windowsill to look at the other birds through the window. It drove him insane with desire for the birds outside.

Then I made a decision. I loved Bert but Bert needed to be outside even if the sparrow hawks would get him. There was a small chance that he could out fly them and go back to the canary islands and spend the rest of his life basking in the spanish sunlight so I said goodbye to Bert and he left in the time honoured way of climbing the stairs and jumping out of the bathroom window.

I can never be certain of this but I am sure I saw him flying as fast as the wind heading home and totally free.

The point of my story is to highlight that animals should live in the wild and we as humans should respect this a little more than we do - animals are not toys, they have a role in our world, in nature and should be allowed to be free - in the same way we are.