Keeping your pet canary in optimal health
Depending on your home environment, sleeping habits, and other factors such as what shift you cover at work, there is a fairly good chance that your canary will suffer from photoexposure and hyperactivity… kind of like canary insomnia!
If you’ve ever experienced a prolonged struggle to sleep at night, you know the huge impact such a seemingly small problem can have on your health and your entire life…
It starts with a lot of yawning and stretching, but eventually it can develop into serious errors of judgment while driving, extreme emotional stress… it’s even directly linked to suicide attempts!
Obviously, getting enough sleep and rest is as integral to your overall health and well-being as it is to your pet canary!
Each “season” in a canary’s life is determined not by temperature (as many novice owners think) but by the total number of hours of sunlight the birds are exposed to…
Too much sunlight can cause chronic molting and can throw a canary’s natural reproductive cycle into complete disarray.
The best way to avoid these problems (especially if you stay up somewhat awake watching TV or reading books) is to simply “imitate” the sunrise and sunset in your home with a drop cloth over the cage – when the sun actually sets, cover the canary’s cage with a cloth or towel that “blocks” all light that might enter the cage. Then, in the morning, when the sun comes up, remove the cloth.
This will act as an artificial preventive measure that will keep your canary’s natural cycle “on schedule,” leaving you with a happier, healthier bird. Easy 🙂 Another important factor in a pet canary’s lifespan is fresh air, or the lack of it. Canaries have incredibly sensitive lungs that are unable to filter out a number of everyday chemicals that we as humans take for granted. If you are a smoker and they smoke inside your home, you will need to have your canary as an outside pet, which can be not only dangerous, but even impossible in some living arrangements!
This can kill your canary instantly!
Even if you’re ready to start smoking outdoors, you’ll first need to quit smoking indoors, open the house to the breeze, and do a thorough cleaning to remove tar and nicotine from the walls.
Open the windows so that sunlight hits the walls and furniture to “fresh” the smell of smoke. Give him about a week (at least) before bringing your canary home.
Other potential health risks indoors include:
Room cleaners, bug sprays, oven cleaners, harsh chemical cleaners, Teflon and other key components of nonstick cookware (during cooking, these materials break down, releasing chemicals that will weaken canaries to death). Poorly kept habitat and the wrong foods can be fatal to canaries!
