NORTH MANKATO — Sometimes, Bob Manwarren says, he thinks his birds eat better than he does.

Manwarren’s birds are canaries. He keeps a hundred or more of them in his basement.

They always eat well, but this time of year, as Manwarren is preparing them for a winter breeding season, he feeds them peas, carrots, romaine lettuce, apples, cucumbers, bread, oatmeal, cornmeal, Shredded Wheat and hard-boiled eggs. He also goes through 25 pounds of bird seed each week.

Like many people with a passion, Manwarren started out small. He had a friend who raised canaries, and the birds fascinated him. Then, while walking through a pet store in the Madison East Center 26 years ago, the trilling song of a male canary captivated him, and he brought the bird home.

It wasn’t long before he had a female and began breeding them. Since then, Manwarren has converted two rooms in the basement of his lower North Mankato home, intended as root cellars, into walk-in aviaries. In one room, he has the males, which are the singers. In the other, he keeps the females.

Manwarren admits, however, to a breech in the room security.  

“Last October, two pesky males snuck into the female room, and they’re still there.” Manwarren says the males in the female room are especially territorial, and fly at his head to try to chase him away, trying to protect the females in the room.

In another room in his basement, there are smaller flights and cages. Some have several birds in them, again, separated by gender; others contain a breeding pair, and then, a few weeks later, their offspring.

The males of the species are the singers, though the females are far from silent. But it’s the male canaries who have the long, trilling songs. Manwarren can determine their gender from the singing, but they don’t sing until they are mature. To determine their sex earlier, he uses a penny.

“I tape a string to a penny, and hold it above the bird. If it moves in a circle, it’s usually a male. If it swings back and forth, it’s most likely a female. People look at you like you’re nuts, but it’s 98 percent accurate.” 

Manwarren expects he will hatch about 50 chicks this winter. In years past, he has hatched as many as 200. He usually picks young birds from the previous year’s hatch for the ones he’ll use in his breeding program. 

The type of feathers each bird has is one consideration in how to pair them. There are the hard feather birds with very sleek and tight feathers. The soft feather birds have looser feathers. There is another feather type, called Parsesian Frill. “They look like they were caught in a wind storm.”

Manwarren runs small classified ads a couple of times each year, he says. Otherwise, many of his birds are sold through word of mouth. He sells birds to individuals who visit his home and to pet stores.

In addition to sharing his home with all the canaries, Manwarren also has two cats: Larry and Neemer. Both cats routinely accompany him to the basement while he does his chores.

In addition to giving fresh food and water to the birds each day, he also cleans every cage daily. Friends save newspapers for that task, he says. “When I was building the flights years ago, I actually took the Free Press as a measure for how big to make them. Now, of course, the paper has shrunk.”

On occasion, a bird will escape during the feeding and cleaning, he says, and the cats always let him know where they have gone. “I just look at the cats, and see where they’re staring to know where to find the bird,” he says. It has happened, however, that the cats have found the bird before he has, Manwarren says.

When Neemer was a kitten, Manwarren says he was so excited about the birds that when he opened a cage to clean it, Neemer jumped right in. Now, for the most part, the birds are routine to the cats, and they prefer to watch birds outside, Manwarren says.

Throughout his house, Manwarren has dozens of houseplants. Even in the winter, with cold dark afternoons, many of the inside plants bloom. And his house is never without birdsong, this time of year, as he keeps lights on for them most of the night to get them ready to breed.

“Between the birds and the plants, I feel like I’m in the tropics. Winter goes faster that way.”