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But when his birds started winning ribbons and trophies in every show in which they were entered, they unexpectedly became profitable. It was not because there is any money connected with these prizes—there isn't. His birds became profitable because every roller fancier in the country wants prize stock. An ardent fancier will pay as much as $50 for a "tutor" bird to teach his young birds to sing. And when Rudolph Rasching's rollers became known as prize winners, roller breeders contacted him, and he found himself with a ready-made profitable hobby.

Since that time, he has found that people who want only a single bird also like to have good singers, though they need not be of such high quality. These pets bring from $25 to $35 each.

Department stores are also customers, because they like to have a reputation for selling sturdy, high quality canaries; and rollers are a favorite.

THE ROLLER is strictly a songbird, and Rasching pays little attention to color. The birds may be yellow, or gray and yellow mixtures, or even solid green.

"The song is all I care about," says Rasching. "A roller's song is a long, rich trill, with notes that are soft and blending."

Good singers are bred by mating birds whose songs contain the qualities a breeder desires. Although female canaries do not sing, Rasching mates the female offspring of good male singers to other good male singers.

"For example," he says, "I may take a male with a good bass roll and mate him to the female of a strain which sings a good water glucke. Perhaps I'll mate one of the resulting young birds with a good schockel singer. After a few years of such selective breeding, I get singers which are accomplished in several tours.

A "tour" is any one of the various song passages which roller canaries sing, These include glucke, bass roll, water glucke, glucke roll, schockel, hollow roll, bell, and hollow bell. It is difficult to describe what each tour sounds like, and, indeed, even the judges at canary shows frequently disagree as to which tour a bird is singing.

For this reason, the winning of show championships is not an easy thing. A bird team which has won a championship in one show may fail miserably in another. It is difficult to please all the judges, because individual tastes differ. Rasching's teams, however, have been given high scores by most of the judges who have heard them.

A TEAM consists of four canaries. Each bird is placed in a separate cage, and the four cages are piled one on top of the other so the birds can't see each other. A team is judged in a closed room with only the judge present.

"Each team is given half an hour to sing," explains Rasching. "If they fail, they are given another chance. But if they produce only a few notes, then they have had their chance."

When a bird team sings, its members do it in their own way. Sometimes they all sing at once; sometimes one or two sing at a time; sometimes (though not often, luckily for Rasching) none of them feels like singing at all. The judges sit absolutely still and wait, doing nothing to coax them to sing. A team is judged somewhat on the amount of singing it does collectively, but the important judging is for the quality of the song.

Not all of the quality of a canary's song is inbred. Much of it is taught to young birds by old singers. A tutor bird is placed on top of the team of four cages and the young canaries imitate him. If one member of a team develops a fault in his song, he is either replaced, or steps are taken to cure him of the fault.

"It isn't easy to cure them of song faults," says Rasching, "but it can be done. They can be put into a flight cage with faultless singers, and that sometimes cures them. Of course, it's easier to cure a young bird of a fault than an old bird."

Because a tutor bird is so helpful in this procedure, the prize-winning tutors command high prices.

ALTHOUGH CANARY fanciers generally buy only songbirds which they can expect to win championships, there is a different kind of person who will buy any canary that sings. These are the people who want a singing canary "just to have some life in the house." To such people, any song the bird may sing is beautiful, and they haven't the slightest idea whether it's a water glucke or a hollow bell, or whether the bird has a fault or not.

"It is to these 'one bird' families that I can sell rollers which may have a few too many chop notes in their song," says Rasching. "Of course, they don't command as high a price as a championship roller. A price of $25 is about the top for an ordinary singer."

Next in price come the female breeding canaries. Rasching's prices for females are from $5 to $10, with an occasional bird of an exceptionally good strain going even a little higher. In Rasching's case, his good reputation among canary fanciers is based on the high quality of his female breeders. Although his prices are a little high, many of his customers spend their money for quality, rather than quantity.

On the evening I visited Rasching, a new customer was bargaining with him for females. She wanted three birds, but was unable to meet the price.

"Take just two," advised the friend who had brought her. "You'll come out as well as if you had three of somebody else's females. I know. I've had good luck with his birds for years!"

Rasching doesn't worry about lowering his prices to meet competition. He concentrates, instead, on raising his standards to overcome competition.

At the bottom of the price scale are the odd few birds that are not up to standard in one way or another. Perhaps a bird will have a spot on its skin or some other minor blemish. Don't think canary breeders ignore such things! The really serious hobbyist inspects a bird literally feather by feather, and shuns any with slight defects. (This is because a few of these blemishes do lead to ailments which cause loss of song, and no roller breeder wants to chance that—slight though the chance may be.)

These "leftover" birds are sold to department stores for about $1 apiece. The stores in turn sell them as 'young birds of undetermined sex.'

"Although such a bird probably won't win any championships," says Rasching, "it will breed if it's a female and it will sing if it's a male. For a shut-in, for example, who wants only to experiment mildly with canary breeding, imperfect birds are satisfactory and they have the added convenience of being inexpensive."

How does Rasching make any profit by selling birds at these prices?

"Well, it averages out," he says in his melodious German accent, chuckling. It costs about $5 per bird per year to feed and house the canaries. Those that I sell at $1 each don't represent a loss because the ones I sell for $50 make up for it.

"My secret is in raising strong, healthy birds through selective breeding. That gives me more of the $50 kind and less of the $1 kind."

RASCHING IS always happy to discuss canary breeding with other breeders, and he is more than generous with advice for beginners.

"It's obvious that one must start with healthy, strong birds," he says, "and it should be equally obvious that your first breeders should be from a strain of good singers, if singers are what you want."

If there are no pedigreed birds in your vicinity, you can purchase them by mail through advertisements in the magazine, American Cage Bird, which is the bible of canary breeders. Or, if you have lots of time and patience, you can even develop a strain of good singers from ordinary singers, if you breed only the best birds of each year's matings. These latter, however, are the "mongrels" of canarydom, and will not command as high a price as pedigreed birds.

A pedigreed bird is one which has only roller canary blood in him, unmixed with warblers, wild canaries, or mongrel stock, much the same way a pedigreed dog is of one breed. Canaries differ slightly in that there are many strains within the roller breed which may be mixed with another and still be considered pedigreed. Most of Rasching's birds are of the Minehaha strain.

Get your birds several weeks before the breeding season (which starts in February in the south or March in the north) and condition them with extra nourishing foods. If you can get them, dandelion greens are one of the best to feed at this time, but rape-seed greens, leaf lettuce, celery leaves, parsley, and mustard greens are equally good.

"I also add extra amounts of pablum, bread, dandelion seeds, oats, linseed meal, poppy seeds, cod liver oil, anise seeds and hemp seeds to their regular diet of canary and rape seeds," says Rasching.

He gets his seed, cages, and other supplies from dealers who advertise in American Cage Bird.

"There you'll find seed for as low as $12 a hundred pounds," says Rasching, "as well as cages at reasonable prices."

Rasching buys most of his cages ready-made, but occasionally builds a flight cage himself. This is a large cage where birds are given freedom to fly and exercise.

BEFORE THE actual breeding time, the breeding cages must be washed and disinfected. Cages are aired out well before use, so that the birds don't become sick from the fumes. Anything containing DDT is taboo around canaries, but some good strong disinfectant (such as kerosene) should be used in order to kill any mite germs in the cage before baby birds are in it.

When the birds are ready to begin nesting, the females indicate it by carrying bits of paper or feathers in their beaks. Sometimes they'll even try to build nests in a corner of the regular cage, or in a seed cup. At this time, the male and female should be put into the small breeding cage by themselves. (The male must be with the female at least seventy-two hours before the eggs are laid or they will not be fertile.)

After the female has laid two or three of her eggs, the male is taken out of the cage and given a day or two of rest before being mated with another female. The male may be mated with as many as six or eight females. The female birds can be mated twice a season, with a rest between raising each batch of youngsters. Some breeders mate their prize-winning females oftener, but give the eggs to another hen to raise, to avoid tiring the best females.

AFTER THE baby birds are born, a mother canary should be fed what she likes best, which usually means a lot of soft bread and milk.

"We pamper them like dowagers when the babies are small," says Rasching with a chuckle. "We hardly dare look into the cage the first week, for fear we'll startle them."

Rasching's breeding room is a warm, quiet, well-insulated basement room. Visitors are kept to a minimum, and those who are allowed into the room must keep their voices low.

"It doesn't take much to startle them," says Rasching, "and if they stay off the nest for a while, the eggs grow cold, and then I get no young birds."

The baby birds are banded when they are five days old. At about a month, they begin to try their voices.

"This is no indication of their future song powers," says Rasching, "but we can tell the males that way."

Over the summer, Rasching keeps his birds in a huge "flight cage" in his garage. During the day, the doors are kept open, and the birds get plenty of fresh air, sunshine, and exercise, to prepare them for the canary shows in the fall.

WHEN THE birds are over their summer moult (loss of feathers) they are caged individually, and their developing song is "judged" by Rasching to see which will be the best singers. The most promising birds are taken up to the Raschings' kitchen, where the cages are placed on shelves. A tutor bird is placed over the school and the young birds develop the good song which was bred into them.

"It's a good idea, if one has time, to darken the young birds' cages for an hour or so each day," says Rasching. "They spend that hour listening to the tutor instead of singing themselves, and their song develops faster."

During this training period, the birds are fed half canary and half rape seed, plus small amounts of egg mash, condition mixture, and vitamin oil food, and of course, greens daily. (The word "greens" includes oranges, tomatoes, and carrots, as well as the leafy greens.)

At least once a week during this period, the birds are put into a flight cage for exercise and a bath. A few hours is sufficient, but they may be left two or three days, because very young birds don't fight much.

When the young birds have developed their song powers, Rasching divides them up into four-bird teams, and lets each team practice individually with the tutor. By December, the birds are in full song and are ready for the roller song shows.

EACH REGION has its own canary association which sponsors shows. Rasching belongs to the Central States Roller Canary Association, with headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Anyone from anywhere in the country may enter rollers, provided they have raised and trained them personally. Champions may not be purchased from other breeders and exhibited by the purchaser. This rule varies in each region. California, for example, allows purchased birds to win prizes. Nobody can cheat on this because each bird has an identification ring around its leg which tells in code numbers everything about its origin.

Each show awards ribbons and trophies in several divisions. For example: Best schockel singer, best team of old birds, best team of young singers (under a year), best bird in show, best hollow bell singer, and other awards. The first place award is usually a ribbon and a trophy, while second through sixth place bird teams are awarded ribbons. This is not a hard and fast rule, however.

A bird team which has won four "best in show" awards is designated as a "champion." The breeder may then enter the birds in the grand champion show, at which the grand champion is selected from among all the champion teams.

There is, of course, more prestige in winning at one of the grand champion shows than there is in winning a show which is open to all.

Rasching seldom travels along with his teams himself. He usually ships the birds air mail, in small cages which fit into special ventilated boxes. The shipping boxes are marked "Live Stock—Handle With Care!" Each bird is given extra amounts of seed for the trip, plus half an apple or orange for liquid. Instead of water, there is a water-soaked sponge placed in each bird's seed cup. That this method of shipping is successful was proved by a team which came back to Rasching from California recently with several first place awards. The judging papers are returned by mail, so the breeder knows how his birds scored.

Birds that are shipped to shows by air mail are cared for during the show period by members of the local group. In the same way, Rasching and other members of the Milwaukee group care for out-of-town birds when they are the host club.

Judges at canary shows are men who have received their training from experienced German and English canary judges. The art of judging is one that is passed on from person to person and cannot be learned from a textbook. The only part of judging that is written in canary association rules is the method of scoring. The Central States group uses the 100 per cent method, allotting so much for each tour. Other groups use a method whereby nine points is the highest score obtainable.

AFTER RASCHING'S birds have won their year's share of the ribbons and trophies, and his prize winners are discussed in canary fanciers' homes all over the country, his big sales season begins. Dozens of breeders visit him each week to buy female breeders. The selling is still going strong in March.

At this, Rasching shakes his head dolefully. "They should get them earlier than March," he says. "The birds like to get used to their new home, just as human beings do."

Although the sales season for breeders is only about three months long, Mr. Rasching's championship stock is always in demand.

"It's amazing the drawing power the word champion has," Rasching comments. "Whenever I get a surplus of ordinary singers and find it necessary to advertise in order to dispose of the excess stock, all it takes is a little two-line classified advertisement worded like this: 'Canaries for sale. Champion roller stock.' Within a week, my surplus is gone!"

Rasching has found that it is much more profitable to sell the birds individually to customers, rather than in large lots to department stores. The stores, of course, pay a lower price because they must leave room for a mark-up.

"The two best places to advertise for individual customers," says Rasching, "are the American Cage Bird magazine, where you contact breeders interested in prize stock, and the classified section of your local paper or of hobby magazines where you contact people who want only a singing canary in their home.