The nest holds five eggs, each the size of a jelly bean.  They are vaguely blue, until a penlight held against the shells flushes them pink, from the inside out.   "Its fertile.  It's fertile.  It's...ehhhhhh, that one's questionable,"  Marvin Walton says.

He replaces the nest in number 16 and reaches into the cage above it.  With a gentle forefinger, he nudges the sitting canary off that nest and holds the penlight against the four eggs inside.  They turn white.

"None of them are good," Walton says.   "It's a clear egg.   So what do I do?  I take her nest.   Those eggs go in the trash."

Marvin Walton bought his first pair seven years ago;
today, his Virginia Beach garage has gone to the birds

  Photos courtesy of:
Bill Tiernan, The Virginian-Pilot

Click on the thumbnail photos for larger versions.

A canary's nest starts as a little plastic bowl just her size, lined with a felt pad.  Each canary may customize her nest with bits of burlap string (provided in her choice of white or natural) and feathers.

The Canary's Nest started as a garage.  It still masquerades as a garage from a street in Virginia Beach, but the inside has been customized and cozied up with heating fans and special lights and a nice sound system.  The 140 or so birds in residence may listen to recorded canary songs or traffic sounds or just kick back with any old radio station. 

They're not particular, but Walton is.  Canaries are mimics.   They learn to sing by listening to older birds, and he wants his birds to learn from the best.

The radio?   He doesn't want them to lead such sheltered lives that thy panic when they leave The Nest.  When canaries are sold, after all, they will hear doors slam and car engines start and people talk and maybe even airplanes take off and land.

Right now, in the garage, canary songs are playing to encourage courtship.  Walton's males in one flight cage sing along.  Interested females in the adjoining flight come to the wire and peer through.  Flattered males offer food.

When the time is right, Walton transfers a pair to a smaller breeding cage, although not always the initial suitor and answering female.   No, Walton pairs his birds by the book - his little black book that records vital statistics on his girls and their guys.  What genes does TCN20502 carry?  Is there a recessive trait?  Did her father sing well?  What color was the mother?   What might the chicks turn out to be?

A lipochrome bird to a frosted.  A variegated bird to a clear.  A recessive white to a red factor.  Walton learned all about genetics 11 years ago when the hospital told him that his sister was a compatible bone marrow match.

Wild canaries are drab yellow-green and brown.  They come from the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa, which were named for the large dogs (Latin name canis) owned by the locals.  In the 1400s, only royalty were allowed to own canaries.  Then, the story goes, a shipwrecked load of birds fell into the hands of commoners and, soon, the little birds with the beautiful songs could be had from peddlers.

Somewhere down the line, someone decided that beautiful voices needed beautiful feathers, and genetic experimentation began.  Canaries were mated with compatible birds of different species, and new colors, sizes and feather types appeared.

Norwich canaries are big and bulky, cresteds have a Beatles-style hairdo.  Lizard canaries have scale-like brown markings on their feathers, and red factors -- well, red factors are another story.

Around the time of World War II, somebody had to have a red canary.  Dr. Hans Duncker of Germany discovered that canaries would mate with siskins, wild South American birds.   He crossed a yellow female with a male siskin and got one fertile chick out of four hatchlings.  He crossed it back to a yellow canary  The fourth generation was bred back to a siskin, to intensify the color.  The war put a stop to his efforts and the red factor nearly died out.  In October 1991, Walton's doctor told him he wouldn't live to see January.

A while back, he bought 11 canaries from a man who wanted to quit his hobby.  Some of the birds had been color fed.  One of the red hens molted out her dyed feathers and grew new ones in a brilliant yellow-orange.  But she never molted her head feathers, and now she has a jaunty, bright red cap.

Walton's own cap looks a little motley around the brim, but there's no point dressing up to visit the garage for four or five hours each day.  Dumping old feed, refilling with new, providing fresh water, changing paper, adjusting humidity, vacuuming seed hulls, and watching, just watching,  140 birds for signs of illness or breeding condition is a time-consuming pleasure.  It's a small business -- his birds sell anywhere from $75 to $125 each -- but the money barely covers his costs.

"They say if it's something you don't mind doing, it's not work," Walton says, and that's good, because there's still the secret cornmeal recipe to cook, the chicken eggs to hard-boil, the records to keep, the Web site to maintain, the business to run, the midnight shift at the post office, two kids at home and a wife who's allergic to birds.

Michelle Walton says her husband burns the candle at both ends but as a child, he had always wanted canaries and never got them, and then cancer cropped up when he was 27 and he beat it back, and it changed the way he looks at life and death and time.

He bought his first pair of canaries -- yellow ones -- seven years ago from a mall pet shop, then discovered they were both males and couldn't breed.  He really wanted red factors, because he thought they were the prettiest, and he found one of the country's premier breeders in North Carolina.  Walton got off the midnight shift, put his family in the car and drove to Winston-Salem.  The first red factor he ever owned was freeze-dried after death and placed in an antique cage, but that's the only bird he ever got sentimental over. 

He learned that at a young age.  His mother drowned in a flash flood when he was 5, and he lost a close relative every year after that for 10 years.  Then came the blood cancer.

"I just see things differently," he says.  "You pick up the pieces and go on.  Life's too short."

He charts in his black book the day the first egg was laid, and the last.   He keeps a record of each parent's leg band number, the date he put the eggs back, the date two weeks hence when he expects hatching.  In a column to the side he notes color and behavior and little things about the chicks like *DEAD*, as is noted next to one.

He is meticulous about this, because he wants precise genetic record, and he doesn't want to mess up the careful breeding of years past with a careless pairing.  Walton was right about number 16:  only four eggs held chicks.

"It's just something that fills up your life," Walton says.  "You've got to make the most of it.   You're not guaranteed tomorrow."

Updated January 17, 2010  The Canary's Nest