ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates a particular construction of childhood through the lens of bird-themed songs for children, revealing the ways in which they promoted mediated, reflexive constructions of children and birds as domesticated—slipping between the categories of wild animal and pet—and subject to legislative intervention. The reflexive exchange between children and birds was more than just a rhetorical or plot device, which children may or may not have noticed in reading or hearing stories. Music publishers capitalized on children's presumed "natural" interest in music, the prevalence of family music making in the home, and the affordability of mass-produced pianos by populating their songbooks with bird songs. The history of pet birds reveals slippage between wildness and pethood, and pet birds were often linked with child ownership. Nature and animal books for young readers proliferated from the late nineteenth century to around 1910, creating a vibrant culture of chickadee-as-child.
