Timbrado Floreado Song

Hi Tom:

Your "fictional" story is more or less true. In fact it could be as valid as any, as we don´t exectly know how things happened. We know that Timbrado comes from the wild canary and we know that wild canary song is very varied to the point thet we can say that , already in wild canaries, there are "lines of song", that´s to say, the birds from different islands sing in a slightly different way. Some are completely discontinuous, some have short continuous notes ( even less than the birds that we call intermediates) but not a single wild canary sings like a classic Timbrado. So, where do long continuous notes in Timbrado come from? There are two possibilities:
- some canaries could have been selected in Spain, from the very beginging, towards continuous song.
- long and prevalent continuous notes come, in Timbrado, from crosses with Roller.
I believe that this second possibility is true, as we know that during 19th and the first half of 20th century most of Spanish canaries were crossed, even song canaries. At that moment the only internationally recognized song bred was Roller and the fanciers thought that the path chosen by Germans was the only possible path. My own grandfather had this crossed birds. Some fanciers realised that this was ending with Spanish song canaries and developed ( after the Spanish Civil War 1936- 39) Spanish Timbrado. The problem is that these fanciers started with already crossed canaries, actually the crosses had gone so far and for such a long time that , probably, they thought that those birds were true Spanish Singers, they didn´t know how a non crossed Spanish Singer could sing. From these birds evolved what we know nowadays as "classic Timbrado".
This could have been the end of the story, if not by a man. This is one of those rare situations in which a single man can change the History, at least the History of Spanish Timbrado. This man was Antonio Drove Aza. Drove was in the 50s and 60s probably the most relevant Spanish expert in canary song. He was a Roller judge but, during his youth, he had bred pure Spanish Singers, working with crosses with wild canary, trying to recover the , already dying, Spanish Song. He knew that all those continuous notes in Timbrado come from crosses with Roller and he tried to explain everyone about that. He knew that Spanish Song canaries were different but he thought that were lost... til he found some alive!! This was in Asturias ( North of Spain) during the 50s. And everything started again, he organized this very small group of fanciers ( no more than 20 ) and explained them the way that he had already travelled during his youth. They were, certainly, rebels but the! ir birds were outstanding and they grew and bloomed. We´re already grewing and blooming thanks to this man.
I didn´t know him but, fortunately, he wrote quite a lot of articles. They are, today, as alive as 50 years ago. I send you the translation of one, made by Sebastian Vallelunga .

Regards ,

Luis