All species › Passerines › Finches, euphonias and allies › Atlantic Canary
Atlantic Canary | Serinus canaria
Kanarie | Serín canario
The Atlantic Canary is the wild ancestor of the cage canary: a small finch of the Canary Islands, Madeira and the Azores, grey-green and streaked rather than plain yellow. In the guide area it occurs only as an introduced bird, with one self-sustaining population on Midway Atoll in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
Voice
The song is a long, continuous run of clear, high trills, rolls and rapid squeaky notes, without a clear beginning or end, and resembles that of the European Serin and the Citril Finch. A single bout may last half a minute. The call is a thin, cheerful tsit or a short skipping trill, often from a small group in a bush. Cage forms sing basically the same song, but in some bred strains selection has made it lower and slower.
Recording: Radek Grochowski — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Ribeira Seca (near Fajã dos Cubres), Calheta, Açores, Portugal · xeno-canto
Identification
The wild bird is green-yellow on forehead, face, throat and breast, with a greyish nape and a grey-green, dark-streaked back; the rump is dull yellow and the belly and undertail whitish with streaks along the flanks. The female is duller, with more grey on head and breast and less yellow below. The bill is short and conical, the tail forked. Escaped cage birds look entirely different: bright canary yellow, orange, white or variegated, often with no streaking at all.
Confusion species
On Midway the canary is the only small green-yellow songbird; the other land birds there are House Sparrow, Common Myna and shorebirds, none of them yellow. On the mainland a bird is almost always an escaped cage bird, and the confusion is then rather with American Goldfinch in winter plumage or with a warbler: the canary has a shorter, thicker conical bill, a forked tail and a heavier, stockier build, and moves about in bushes rather than in the canopy.
Habitat
In its native range, half-open country up into the mountains: laurel forest, pine woodland with undergrowth, terraced farmland, orchards and gardens. On Midway it keeps to the planted ironwoods and ornamental shrubs around the former base, to lawns with seeding herbs and to the gardens. Seed of herbs and grasses is the staple, with buds, small fruit and, in the breeding season, insects.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
Native only to the western Canary Islands, Madeira and the Azores. In 1911 canaries were released on Sand Island in Midway Atoll, where the species established itself and still breeds; it is the only self-sustaining population in this guide area. An introduction on Bermuda in 1930 lasted into the 1960s and then died out. On the main Hawaiian Islands and on the North American mainland the birds involved are always individual escaped cage birds, with no established breeding population; such records are also known from Puerto Rico.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Midway can be visited only by permit; the birds are then found in the built-up part of Sand Island among the ironwoods, where they sing all year. Elsewhere in the guide area, first settle whether the bird is a bred form: a plain yellow or white bird without streaking is an escaped cage bird. In a doubtful case watch the forked tail and the short bill.
Conservation
Worldwide the species is listed as Least Concern (LC), with a few hundred thousand birds in its native range and a stable trend. The Midway population is small and isolated; disease work on the atoll recorded avian pox among the introduced songbirds there. Management on Midway centres on the seabird colonies and on keeping out rats and mice; the canary is not controlled there.
Scientific name
Serinus canaria | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Fringilla Canaria; because it was later placed in Serinus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Serinus was introduced in 1816 by Carl Ludwig Koch, from French serin for this group of finches. The species name canaria refers to the Canary Islands, which take their name from Latin canariae insulae 'islands of dogs', after the large dogs the islanders were said to keep. The bird is thus named after the islands and not the other way round; the colour term canary yellow goes back to the bred form.