Keeping Your Pet Canary in Optimum Health
Depending on your home environment, sleeping habits and other factors like what shift you cover at work, there’s a fairly good chance that your canary is suffering from exposure to TOO MUCH light and activity… kind of like a Canary Insomnia!
If you’ve ever had a long-term struggle falling asleep at night, you know how big of an impact such a seemingly small problem can have on your health and your entire life…
It starts out with a lot of yawning and stretching, but eventually can progress to making serious errors in judgment while driving, intense emotional stress… it’s even been directly linked to suicide attempts!
Obviously, getting enough sleep and rest is INTEGRAL to your overall health and well-being as it is with your pet canaries!
Every “season” in your canary’s life is determined NOT by the temperature (as many newbie owners believe) but by the total number of hours of sunlight the birds are exposed to…
Too much sunlight can cause chronic moulting and can throw the canary’s natural breeding cycle into total chaos.
The best way to avoid these problems (especially if you stay up fairly late watching television or reading books) is simply to “mimic” sunrise and sunset in your own home with a drop cloth on the cage – when the sun physically goes down outside, cover your canary cage with a drop cloth or towel that “blacks out” all light that might otherwise penetrate the cage. Then, in the morning, when the sun comes up, remove the cloth.
This will serve as an artificial preventative measure that will keep your canary’s natural cycle “on schedule”, leaving you with a happier, healthier bird. Easy:-) Another important factor in your pet canary’s lifespan is fresh air, or lack of it. Canaries have incredibly sensitive lungs that are unable to filter out a number of the everyday chemicals we as human beings have come to take for granted. If you’re a smoker, and you smoke inside of your house, you’ll need to make your canary an outdoor pet, which can be not only dangerous, but in some living arrangements – impossible!
THIS CAN KILL YOUR CANARIES INSTANTLY!
Even if you’re willing to start smoking outdoors, you’ll first need to quit smoking indoors, open up the house to breeze, do a thorough cleaning to remove the tar and nicotine from the walls.
Open up the windows so that sunlight is hitting the walls and furniture, “activating” the smoke smell. Give it about a week (at least) before introducing your canary into the home.
Other potential health risks indoors include:
room deodorizers, bug sprays, oven cleaners, harsh chemical cleaners, Teflon and the other main components of non-stick cookware (as you cook, these break down, releasing chemicals that will rapidly debilitate your canary to the point of death). A poorly kept habitat and the wrong foods can be DEADLY for canaries!