The
yellow canary (
Crithagra flaviventris) is a small passerine bird in the true finch family. It is a resident breeder in much of the western and central regions of southern Africa and has been introduced to Ascension and St Helena islands.
Taxonomy: The yellow canary was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus´s
Systema Naturae. He placed it with the crossbills in the genus
Loxia and coined the binomial name
Loxia flaviventris. He specified the location as the Cape of Good Hope. The specific epithet
flaviventris is from Latin
flavus meaning "yellow" and
venter (genitive
ventris) meaning "belly". Gmelin based his account on the "Le Gros-bec jaune du Cap de Bonne Espérance" that had been described and illustrated in 1760 by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson.
The yellow canary was formerly placed in the genus
Serinus but a phylogenetic study published in 2012 found that the genus was polyphyletic. In the reorganisation to create monophyletic genera,
Serinus was split and a number of species including the yellow canary were moved to the resurrected genus
Crithagra that had originally been introduced in 1827 by the English ornithologist William Swainson.
Four subspecies are recognised:
- C. f. damarensis (Roberts, 1922) – southwest Angola, Namibia, Botswana and central north South Africa
- C. f. flaviventris (Gmelin, JF, 1789) – extreme south Namibia and west, southwest South Africa
- C. f. guillarmodi (Roberts, 1936) – highlands of Lesotho
- C. f. marshalli (Shelley, 1902) – southeast Botswana, central, northeast South Africa and lowlands of Lesotho
The yellow canary is typically 10 cm in length. The adult male colour ranges from almost uniform yellow in the northwest of its range to streaked, olive backed birds in the southeast. The underparts, rump and tail sides are yellow. The female has grey-brown upperparts, black wings with yellow flight feathers, and a pale supercilium. The underparts are white with brown streaking. The juvenile resembles the female, but has heavier streaking.
This species is easily distinguished from the yellow-fronted canary by its lack of black facial markings, and its bill is less heavy than that of other similar African
Crithagra species.
The brimstone canary, with overlapping range, is a known confusion species.
Distribution and habitat: Its habitat is karoo and coastal or mountain valley scrub. It builds a compact cup nest in a scrub. The yellow canary is a common and gregarious seedeater. Its call is
chissick or
cheree, and the song is a warbled
zee-zeree-chereeo.
Mascot: The yellow canary is the mascot of William Allen High School in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
The yellow canary (Sarı Kanarya) is the official mascot of Fenerbahçe S.K. in Istanbul, Türkiye