18. Since the 16th century, chaffinches have been competing to sing the most songs in an hour across Belgium and the Netherlands
Birdsong, in case you didn’t know, is a territorial behavior intended to warn off rivals. Though at times it seems to be for our edification, this is the avian equivalent of shouting obscenities at your neighbors. In medieval Europe, someone hit upon the idea of starting a competition to see which bird could sing the loudest and most frequently in a set period of time, and thus the sport of Finching, or Vinkensport, was born. Finching involves placing boxed male chaffinches next to each other to provoke a verbal tirade, and keeping a tally of which is the most vociferous.
There are very strict rules for what constitutes a proper song. The chaffinches must end each call with a correct flourish – known phonetically as a susk-e-wiet – to score a point, which is added to a tally on a chalkboard. Singing a wrong note means instant disqualification. Matches are held on streets, with a judge keeping a close eye on affairs. Traditionally, it was a practice of chaffinch trainers, or vinkeniers, to blind their birds with hot needles to prevent distraction, but this aspect of an already controversial sport amongst animal rights activists has been banned for a long time.
The first recorded instance of competitive chaffinch-singing took place in 1593, but Vinkensport is still popular today, with 13, 000 vinkeniers breeding 10, 000 birds a year in 2007. Keeping a bird in a wooden box to sing is not only mean, but open to corruption. The champion bird Schauvlieghe, which managed a record tally of 1, 278 susk-e-wiets in an hour, was rumored to have been injected with testosterone. Recently, one trainer had a bird that sang exactly 725 times an hour every match. Suspicious, the judge opened the vinkenier‘s box to find a CD player playing chaffinch songs.