“Go brush your teeth,” Poppy ordered, pointing to the bathroom. I had a penchant for kissing Bonk on the beak; he could bite through my lip if he wanted to, but he was delicate as a flower floating on the surface of a pond.
“When I was in Egypt, I had three beautiful cousins die of parrot fever.”
Poppy had told me the story a hundred times. I was sympathetic, but I didn’t want any obstructions in my relationship with Bonk. Psittacosis—parrot fever—killed many people in Egypt in the 1930s, according to Poppy, but I knew Bonk didn’t have it. I plunked my little son onto my shoulder, locked myself in the bathroom, and ran the water to humor Poppy, but didn’t brush my teeth.
Peter’s Valentine’s Day gift started to become more important to me than Peter, which was significant, since I had suffered a crush on Peter since eleventh grade. Most days after school that year, I drove to Super Pet Mart, where he was the assistant manager, and I’d linger in the aisles to watch the red factor canaries sing, the ferrets and hedgehogs sleep, and the kittens play, not because I wanted these animals, but because I desired Peter’s attention. I’d stand near the rodent section and ask him about the Russian hamsters, the long-haired mice, and the baby guinea pigs.
I lurked among the dark rows of fish tanks stacked four high, the chaotic underwater world darting around in bright flashes. I’d ask him about puffer fish, anemones, and water turtles—so many questions that he’d become irritated and pawn me off onto another employee. Peter was several years older than I was, cute and husky, and he limped a little from a high school baseball knee injury, but he knew a lot about animals, and I found that sexy. It seemed to me we were kindred spirits, even if he didn’t know it.
After graduating from Miami Palmetto Senior High, I enrolled at Miami Dade Community College, where Peter was a part-time student. During my first semester, I followed him to a frat party and talked with him into the night, winning his heart with my knowledge of birds and Bob Marley.
The summer before I turned nineteen, he hired me at the pet store as the “fish girl.” I took care of dozens of fish tanks, a job I adored, since I could bring Bonk to work. I learned how to clean gravel and slope it toward the back of the tanks so they looked bigger. I changed water and measured salinity. I learned the names and particulars of hundreds of fish species, and discovered which fish lived together peaceably and which would eat one another. Sometimes Bonk ran down my arm to quibble with the fish, and I had to pluck him up before he jumped in with the neon tetras.
Bonk shunned almost everyone, and when he felt threatened by someone standing nearby, he’d run down my arm, beak open, tongue waggling, and lunge at the marauder. At five inches tall, he was an alligator wrestler in a little bird’s body. I felt safe with Bonk, my mini green guard dog.
“Get that brat away from me,” Peter warned as Bonk planted a well-placed bite on his arm, hand, or neck, picking the bird up in his fist and handing him to me the way someone would hang up a phone. I’d apologize and try to maintain a neutral expression, but I wasn’t sorry. No one came between Bonk and me, not even the person who brought us together.
When I had to lock Bonk in his cage, he complained and performed a frantic door dance, running back and forth in front of the cage door, rattling it like a thirsty prisoner, yawping as if tortured. He learned how to open the doors to his cage, and I had to clip them shut. He was a bird genius, coming when I called him, like a maniacal green Chihuahua running across the carpet, up the fabric of my clothing and onto my shoulder. I kept his wings clipped so he wouldn’t fly away when I took him outside. It upset me to clip him, but I didn’t want to lose him to an appealing updraft or olive tree.
Bonk’s intense likes and dislikes surprised me. He despised not only tissues, but full cups of food—he’d burrow into a cup of seed, scattering it three feet around his cage, then stand by the empty dish, sticking his head in and out as if he wondered where the seed went. He was strange around money: he’d argue with a penny, screaming at it and flipping it over until it fell off the surface of the table or he’d shoved it under something.
“You are starting to look alike,” Poppy teased, when I showed up with Bonk on my shoulder. Bonk had his own cage at Nona and Poppy’s place.
“That’s OK,” I said. “Bonk is much prettier than me.”
“Heavens forbid,” Poppy said, holding his palms up to the ceiling.
“You think I’m prettier than a bird?”
“You are prettier than all the birds in the world.”
“I don’t think so.” I handed Bonk to Poppy, and the bird bit him hard on the webbing between thumb and forefinger. Poppy shook his hand and Bonk fell to the floor. Bonk stretched himself up on tippy toes, flapped his wings, and chirruped loudly.
“This bird loves you,” Poppy said, inspecting his hand. “And only you.”
Bonk loved small, dark places, too, such as the insides of shoes and the space under my bed covers. He was a little messy, but since he was such a small bird, his messes were small, too. Once, someone at a gas station asked me if I had a bird and I said yes, proudly, thinking he had seen me somewhere with Bonk until he pointed out a squiggle of dried bird poop on my T-shirt.
Our four cats—Emmeline, Paisley, Gladys, and Sylvester—didn’t take an interest in Bonk. Paisley, the gray tabby feral I’d fished from a dumpster when she was a tiny kitten with her eyes still closed, caught wild birds a few times and brought them into the house—doves mostly, to my horror. I put bells on the cats to prevent a backyard bird slaughter, and kept a close watch on the cats when Bonk was out of his cage—there were plenty of birds outside for them to stalk, and indoors it was easier to sprawl in a beam of sunshine on the slate floor and groom one another’s ears.
Bonk had a fondness for chewing the plastic off the ends of shoelaces, so it was difficult to relace my shoes should the lace slip out. He stole and chewed my pen caps into anthills of plastic. All my pens dried out and I had to throw them away. Each morning, while I put on makeup, Bonk fought ferociously with his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
When we settled down to watch television or read a book, he’d sit on my forehead, grip my bangs, and preen my eyebrows, one hair at a time. He’d peer inside my ears and trim my nail cuticles. He spent hours “picking off” the freckles on my arms and neck, and I let him do it because it was a good service, if a futile one, though he could pinch like a wire cutter with his sharp beak.
After a year, Peter fired me from the pet store, blaming it on the manager, mumbling something about cutbacks. He didn’t want me around anymore. He worked six days a week and liked to carouse with his pals on the weekends. I was underage and couldn’t go to bars. Then I heard he’d bought a lovebird for another girl.
He came over during one of our big fights to take back his scuba equipment, which he kept in our garage because he liked to practice diving in the waterway behind our house. Before he arrived I put on every bit of his scuba equipment, from the wet suit to the flippers, hauled the heavy tanks onto my back, put the mask on my face, stuck the buoyancy compensator valve in my mouth, and did a penguin dance in front of the picture window as he thumped on the door, shaking my butt and wiggling my hips, flapping my feet around in a circle, flashing him my best jazz hands. I thought he’d laugh.
He kicked the door and his foot walloped through it, wood cracking and a panel of the door splintering at my feet. I flip-flapped in the black flippers like a terrified penguin toward the phone to call 911, but he reached through the hole in the door, unlocked it, rushed inside, and grabbed the phone from my hand, pulling the cord from the wall. I closed my eyes, waiting for a blow to the face or something equally furious; instead, he cried. He begged me to tell my parents that the cats whacked the foot-size hole in the door, but that was ridiculous. My parents demanded I never see him again. Poppy said if Peter wanted to speak with me, he would have to knock on the door with his foot—gently—because his arms would be so full of presents and flowers. Short of that, which wasn’
t going to happen, Peter was persona non grata.
I didn’t want anything around that reminded me of Peter. I tossed or regifted everything he had ever given me, but I convinced myself that Bonk wasn’t in any way associated with him. Bonk was a bird of my making, a creation of my love and attention, rarer than opals.
Chapter 6
“Morning, Bonk!” I sang, walking down the hall after I woke, whistling a catcall. That whistle was our “contact call,” a specific sound many species of birds repeat between partners or offspring to communicate location and well-being when the partner is out of sight. I was an honorary bird.
Bonk was almost two years old and I was nearly twenty, and we’d done this ritual since Bonk could catcall. After washing my face and brushing my teeth, I beelined for his cage to say good morning and feed and water him, whistling as I approached. This morning, Bonk didn’t catcall back.
I found him crouched at the bottom of his cage, feathers fluffed and ruffled, hunched in a back corner. He didn’t dance or beg to sit on my shoulder, wail to be let out, or rattle the cage door. I opened the cage and he hissed at me. He gaped his beak wide, black tongue waggling, and snapped at my hand.
I tried to coax him from the corner with a pen cap, but he hissed in short bursts, and fluffed his neck feathers, like a dog raises its hackles. I filled his food dish and that brought him out of the corner. There was a white oblong object at the bottom of the cage. Bonk ate a few seeds, then rushed back to the object and settled himself—no, herself—back onto it.
Bonk was a hen. Push me over with a feather.
Parrots, like chickens, can lay infertile eggs. Although no chick will ever hatch from an infertile egg, the bird is nonetheless protective of it. Bonk defended and warmed that infertile egg. Her life became centered on it, and she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore.
How could she forget the relationship we had forged over the past two years, all those days of hand-feeding, the ruined shoelaces, our sitcom nights? Perhaps in the same way a doting mother doesn’t want to lose a child to teenage-hood, I didn’t want to lose my Bonk to an egg.
I had no idea what to do. Should I take her egg away? I considered that cruel, and she wouldn’t let me near it anyway. On Tuesday, four days after Bonk laid her egg, I attended the monthly meeting of the Florida chapter of the Cockatiel and African Lovebird Society. We met inside a junior high school at eight in the evening and listened to lectures by local veterinarians, bird breeders, and genetics experts. Sometimes members prepared lectures on proper feeding, cage building, or hurricane preparation. Between twenty and thirty people showed up, all much older than myself, mostly retirees. I couldn’t wait to tell them about the egg.
“Where’s your little peachie?” asked Marge, the club’s treasurer, a retired grandmother who bred lovebirds and cockatiels.
“Bonk had an egg,” I said, forming an egg shape with my fingers to show her how big it was.
“That’s wonderful!” she said. “Now you can breed her. It’s great to have a healthy egg-laying hen.”
“But she doesn’t like me anymore.”
“She’ll like you again as soon as you take away the egg.”
“She won’t let me near it.”
“Let her sit on it for a week, then put on some gloves and take it away. In no time she’ll be your buddy again. It’s the same when they have babies.”
“Isn’t that … mean?” I said.
“It’s meaner to let her sit for weeks on an egg that won’t hatch,” Marge said. “It’s a waste of her time and takes away from her happiness. She’ll never have a baby from an infertile egg, and that’s got to be more frustrating than anything.”
Other group members suggested removing all paper material from Bonk, even the newspaper lining her cage. Shredding paper stimulates breeding behavior in lovebird hens. Bonk shredded any bit of paper in her reach—newspaper, paperback books, tissue boxes—into thin, identical strips, and stuffed them between the turquoise feathers of her rump. This is how peach-faced lovebirds transport nesting material. Male lovebirds don’t do this, so it’s a reliable way to tell the difference between genders. I must have been daydreaming in some of the bird society meetings, because I hadn’t registered that before.
Poppy arranged to pick me up to spend the night with him and Nona that weekend, saying he had errands nearby. I don’t think he had errands—he didn’t want to worry about me on the road by myself. I was excited to show him the egg.
“She will not have a baby from that egg,” he said, bending at cage level to peer at Bonk as I lured her out of the corner with a wooden spatula.
“I know.”
“She might have more eggs.”
“I know.”
“She wants a boyfriend.”
“I know.”
“What do you not know, Chérie?”
“I don’t know how to take it away from her.”
“Do you want my help?”
“I’m not ready,” I said.
He put his arm around my shoulder and we watched Bonk for a minute as she warmed her egg, eyeing us like a security guard.
“You are a good mother.”
We left, and it was the first time since I’d had Bonk that she didn’t accompany me for a sleepover at Nona and Poppy’s apartment. I was lonely without her.
I let the cranky, protective new “mom” pamper her single egg for well over a week. Then, with an acidic taste in my mouth and trembling hands, I slid on my mother’s yellow dishwashing gloves.
I tiptoed to the cage and stood for a long time, watching Bonk. She huddled in the corner, crouched on top of her egg, watching me. It was a face-off, nose to beak.
Bonk rushed at me with her beak wide as I pulled the cage door open. I distracted her using a pencil and led her away from the egg. She bit the pencil eraser off and fought with the crimped silver ferrule. With my other gloved hand, I reached toward the egg and removed it from the cage.
Bonk hurried to the corner where her egg had been. She seemed disoriented for a minute, then hopped to her food dish and began munching the end off a carrot.
In the kitchen, I rested the warm egg on a bed of cotton balls in a plastic container and studied it. It looked like a miniature chicken egg, the same color and shape. Bonk’s egg ranked among my prize possessions. I found clear nail polish in my mother’s bathroom cabinet and sat at the kitchen counter and painted the egg so it would last. I placed her egg and its cotton-wad nest on a bookshelf in my room, high enough so Bonk wouldn’t see it.
Bonk and I renewed our friendship, but I couldn’t stop obsessing about the egg. Maybe Bonk needed a mate. I didn’t want to breed her, but I did want her to have a companion, so I bought a black-masked lovebird.
Breeding the black-masked with the peach-faced lovebird would create a hybrid bird, often called a “mule” because they’re infertile, a taboo in the bird community. I didn’t intend on breeding the two birds, so I didn’t give them a nest or any paper to shred. I named the new bird Baby. He had a striking black head, a body covered in blue hues ranging from sky to sapphire to royal, and a thick white collar around his neck like a nobleman in a Renaissance painting.
Baby was skittish and scrambled to the back of the cage when I put my hand inside to retrieve him, though once free from the cage he was happy to settle on my shoulder or fall asleep under my chin. When Bonk met Baby she ran at him, beak open, and dove for his toes to chomp them off. After a month there was no change in the behavior of either bird, so I bought a Fischer’s lovebird and named him Smidge, a feisty red-beaked youngster who bit hard when he didn’t get his way. He liked to bite my neck, and he didn’t like Bonk or Baby at all. The three birds lived in the same room in separate cages for several months, with no interaction between any of them. Bonk laid more eggs.
So did Baby and Smidge.
I had three hens.
After another trip to a bird breeder’s house with my parents, who had offered to buy me a few lovebirds, and two mor
e females—now I had five lovebirds—I discovered how to make an educated guess about lovebird gender. Peach-faced and masked lovebirds are monomorphic, meaning that there are no real visible differences between the genders, but a knowledgeable lovebird keeper notices the subtle variances.
Female lovebirds are often larger than males, and have a feistier personality; the male’s bone structure is finer and his personality is easygoing and gentle if he’s tame. A female’s hip bones, which can be felt by placing a finger on her vent (also called the cloaca, where feces is expelled), are wider and the bones are blunter than the male’s, whose hip bones are often sharp and closer together.
I called Marge from the lovebird club and told her I wanted to find a mate for Bonk and not keep guessing about gender. I also told her I wanted a lutino male—bright yellow body with a red face—so the babies would hatch out pied. Pied was my favorite color mutation at the time, a lovebird with feathers of varying colors smattered onto one individual like a Jackson Pollock painting.
“That’s not how it works, girl,” she said. “You can’t put a green bird and a yellow bird together and come out with pied babies.”
“Green plus yellow doesn’t equal pied?”
“There has to be pied in the bird’s genetics. One of the parents has to be either pied or split to pied.”
I focused on finding a male, no matter the color mutation. Within a month, Bonk had accepted Binky, a year-old male peach-faced lovebird that looked like her.
I hung a wooden nest box in their cage, and a few weeks later Bonk laid five eggs. Each of those eggs was a revelation. I wanted to hold them, to witness the movements inside each moony shell. I spent a lot of time sitting by the cage, watching Bonk and Binky hop in and out of the wooden nest box, Binky feeding Bonk by regurgitating his food into her beak at the entrance to the nest as she warmed the eggs. Female lovebirds brood their eggs, unlike cockatiels and pigeons, who share egg-warming duties, though at night both lovebird parents will sleep inside the nest.
The Bird Market of Paris Page 5