You are all in for an exciting and fun week of Wild Facts.  I guarantee this week is going to bring you back to your childhood.  Every animal we talk about this week will be based off of a cartoon character.  I figured this is fitting since Facebook is covered with cartoon characters this weekend in an effort to raise awareness for child abuse.  So make sure you stop by every day to see if we feature your favourite childhood cartoon character. We are going to start with the Yellow Canary which is of course based on one of my mom’s favourite characters, Tweety Bird.

The Yellow Canary is a small bird in the finch family which can be found breeding in the central and western regions of southern Africa.  Interestingly enough the males are almost completely yellow in the northwestern parts of their range while they tend to have olive coloured backs in the southeast regions.  Incidentally, the females have gray underparts with black wings and yellow flight feathers.  I am guessing this most likely makes Tweety Bird a male Yellow Canary from the northwest region of southern Africa.  Just so you know during the “Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries” series, they actually identified Tweety as a male.  All these years, I had thought Tweety Bird was a girl.

The Yellow Canary is a voracious seed eater which most likely plays a  pretty big role in seed distribution throughout their home range.  They also have a few different calls or songs that they can make.  Below is a short video of a singing Canary.

There song is suppose to sound like zee-zeree-chereeo.  I don’t know if I heard that sound in the video above.  Below is sound clip which will give you a better idea of the Yellow Canary song.

Now that sounds more like the song of the Yellow Canary.

Yellow Canary Fast Fact – I know we think of the Yellow Canary as a cartoon character that provided us with hours of entertainment but they also saved lives.  The Yellow Canary was famous for being used in coal mines which provided a warning for the miners.  If the little bird died then it was time to move out.  See, as the miners went deeper into the ground they ran into all kinds of ventilation problems.  Obviously without enough oxygen in the air the miners wouldn’t last too long.  The Yellow Canary has a very sensitive metabolism and is able to detect traces of methane and carbon monoxide long before humans would have known about it.  Unfortunately these birds sacrificed their lives to warn the miners but it was an effective, albeit low tech system for the coal miners.

That does it for the first cartoon animal of the week.  Check back tomorrow to see if your favourite cartoon animal is featured.