Most song canaries are trained when young being placed close to an adult male, sometimes their own father or a male whith similar song characteristics. However the Discontinuous line of Timbrado has been developed from a completely different aproach which is also used by many breeders from other lines, specially the Intermediate and, even, some Roller fanciers. We don´t allow our young birds to listen to any adult bird and they develop the kind of song that their genes lead to. We believe that doing this we focus on the most important feature of any race, the genetic pool. The outcome are birds that will be as good as our pairings have been and this is the real difficult issue: the proper selection of reproducers and pairings.

To avoid any listening of adult songs we put apart chicks as soon as they can eat by themselves, placing them in separate rooms inside flight cages where there must be, at least, two males. In each flight cage there will be just siblings or half siblings if neccesary and they will stay there till their song is almost completely mature what will happen from November to January. With this "non tutoring method" of song learning we try to discover the genetic potential of the young birds without any teaching interference and, so, just the best gifted will be selected for breeding. But there´s another strong point with this method: each group of brothers will have a different song, closer to the other groups the closer our inbreeding is. This is much more interesting for us, as we´ll never be bored with our birds' song, but it´s also very important with matings of non too close genetically related birds. In this kind of pairings the outcome is very unpredictable as the song of the chicks may tend towards the male side, the female or any in between way. If we leave the father as a master most probably his sons will develop much of his song and we won´t know if the chicks could have been ever better than him.

We don´t use any tutors in our aviary neither we educate our birds with electronic songs. So all the birds that we breed are trained with this non tutoring method including the samples that you can listen at this web page.  

Miguel Angel Obeso miguelobeso@hotmail.com