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Opening
BORDERS
tHe History
oF tHe Fiorino Canary
Introduction and Justification nos, and decided to write my thesis about
them. This choice of subject was also influen-
This paper is based on the thesis that I wrote ced by what I learned about their history. As
in the context of a two-year training course a collector of books on birds, I had purchased
to qualify as a judge of posture canaries at the monograph “Canaricoltora” by prof. Um-
national Dutch level. When I applied for this berto Zingoni at the stand of the F.O.I. at the
training in 2018, I had little or no experience Mondial in Cesena, with a photograph of a
with breeding and showing posture canaries. crested Fiorino on the cover [1]. His activity
On the other hand, I had been exposed to during some twenty years, besides his acade-
them in several ways as an active breeder and mic career, to create and propagate a new va-
judge of colored canaries. This had aroused riety of posture canary, starting from a simple
my interest in these birds, so that as a recent idea, appealed to me.
pensioner I was already thinking of extending
my hobby in this direction. During the years, Furthermore, I observed that there was not
I had also studied a number of books on the much written material about the Fiorino in
subject. This experience turned out to be my native Dutch language. Also, there tur-
sufficient to pass the admission test for the ned out to be quite an overlap in what was
course. This meant that I now had to make available. Some texts even appeared to have
a serious start with posture canaries. Like al- been re-used on multiple occasions. There-
most anyone, I started with the “easy” varie- fore, I made an effort to get my hands on a
ties: Gloster, Scotch and Fife Fancy. After one number of publications by prof. Zingoni, and
year of training, the instructors gently insis- to translate them into Dutch. This allowed me
ted that I should also gain some experience to reconstruct the history of the Fiorino. In
with frilled birds. After instructive and enjo- this process, I took the liberty to use my own
yable visits to various shows and to fellow ju- words and to add an extra clarification whe-
dges, the Fiorinos were one of the varieties never I felt the need to do so. The present
that then appeared in my collection. article is in turn an English version of that ac-
count.
For me, they had the same advantage as the
English varieties from the first breeding sea- The Idea of a New Variety
son: an easily reproducing species whose
housing between my colored canaries was The story of the Fiorino begins in 1971, in
straightforward. Only during the year, I began Florence, Italy, with prof. Umberto Zingoni
to fully appreciate my newly acquired Fiori- and his associate Michele del Prete. At that
30 Federación Ornitológica Argentina
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