The Club of Queer Crafts

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 110, 30 July 1927, Page 8

The Club of Queer Crafts

No. 9 —The Master of Birds

U'OR 52 years tile old bird shop in Upper Queen Street has supplied pets to generations of Aucklanders. There a thousand little feathered throats chirp and twitter their treble counter-note on an air raucous with the squawking and quacking of larger fowl. Playful puppies yelp at the children who gather round their cages. A smiling spectacled old lady feeds a currant bun to three eager woolly Pomeranian puppies. The Master of the Birds, a benevolent vassal not so much of King Goshawk as of these myriad piping canaries and sage parrots, busies himself amid the din.

Back beyond 1575 when “Johnny” Walker was a lad, his hobby was to trade in pets, for ever swapping or selling until he worked up a business that came to be housed on Upper Queen Street.

That little shop he peopled with feathered or furred folk gathered from agents all over the world. And those vivid gay exotics kindled a love of birds in boys and girls, who, now old men and women, often re-enter the shop to recapture the atmosphere of those days and to peer into the self-same cages now ruled by “Johnny” Walker’s son.

Still from all sources arrive the queer cargoes of Chinese nightingales or Mexican parrots to people the pens anew.

There in the window on a bough set upright perch dozens of chirping blue javas flocking with grey,hooded New Guinea nuns and cut-throat sparrows, their tiny necks gashed with a line of vivid crimson. At the foot of the tree, noses to earth, in a perpetual hungry hunt, run half a dozen baby Angora rabbits. A cage of restless goldfinches be tray a little known trade in this country. They have been taken by bird-trappers who, with birdlime or nets, have made their day profitable by snaring birds for sale. Little bundles of feathers and foolishness, the African and Taha weavers give themselves no rest as with their faint notes they hop from spar to floor and from floor to ceiling in their cages. Here be a cloud of green love birds flocking with little spicefinches and brown and mottled warblers from Australia.

High above the din, serene and un disturbed in their eternal caress, two ring-doves perch together—tame strokable creatures of grey, smooth plumage.

Next door is a Yorkshire canary, the gentleman of the fancy, breeders call him, from his tall graceful body And his neighbours are a flock of yellow-hammers w-ho began their lives in English cages. Cooing quietly in solitude are pigeons of a dozen breeds—racers and fantails, whose forbears 20 years ago cost many guineas in an English dovecote.

Among the charges of the Master of Birds is a terrace of talkers. Grave of mien the cockatoos bridle and raise their yellow crests to intruders. Affectionate galahs clad in pink and salmon sit in a grave row next to a pen of Mexican’s in vivid green. And in a cage shaded from the light a delicate Mexican has his Mexican summer in Auckland's cold winter

before a glowing electric heater. Nor is utility neglected in the House of Birds. A speckled guinea fowl, sterling watch-bird against the henyard-robbing hawk, raises his scraggy neck to sound his rattling squawky cry. The large muscovite ducks and gobblers are dedicated to the epicure’s pot. Chanticleer in his enormous black robe of orpington feathers lords it in his pen of fowls and contrasting strangely are his neighbours—tiny Old English and feathery-legged Pekinese bantams. Cage upon cage is filled with fancy pets—black rabbits and guinea pigs and downy Angora rabbits with rakish set ears. Wolf sable and pure white pomeranian puppies tussel play fully -while their neighbours, fox terriers and collies, snooze away the hours until a buyer arrives to take them from their comrades. Ministering to the great love of pets is a whole-time work—a life work. From all over the Pacific come orders for birds to the old house of “Johnny” Walker and Son. H.I.M.