Bird noise is cumulative—it might be manageable for months, even years, but one day the chirping, squawking, talking, and twitting breaks someone’s sound barrier, erasing whatever noise tolerance they’d built. I didn’t hear the birds anymore. A macaw could scream in my ear and it wouldn’t register; but my dad didn’t share this quality, and we started fighting about the conures, Amazons, and macaws. He even blamed me for the feral colonies of parrots that visited us. I was forced to thin the noisier birds from my flock. Each bird I rehomed tore at the thin scabs that had formed over the dozens of bird-shaped wounds I’d suffered in the hurricane, and alcohol was the only thing that alleviated the sting.
On the Fourth of July, I walked to Baja Beach Club to meet two guys and a girl I had been hanging around with there. I found them at one of the back bars, already drinking. I rolled up to the bar, greeted them, and ordered a margarita on the rocks. I shot that and ordered another.
We walked toward the side bar, where it was a little quieter. I took the lead, and on the way stumbled into a girl, spilling part of her drink. Cold liquid and ice splashed onto my sandals. I looked into her face, waiting for a reaction.
“You spilled my drink, bitch,” she yelled over the music. Her red mouth formed the word “bitch” in slow motion, her hoop earrings swaying against her cheek as she swiveled her neck in my direction.
I could have said, “Excuse me” or “I’m sorry.” But I stared into her eyes, stunned, waiting for her to speak again. Instead, she pushed me. Without thinking, I shoved her drink into her face. She dropped her glass, shattering it on the floor.
In seconds, she and three other girls jumped on top of me, punching and kicking. I gripped one girl’s long, red hair, pulling her toward my face while her friend pounded on my back. The redhead laughed.
“I didn’t do anything to you!” she yelled, smiling like a carnival barker. I released her hair. They were punching me, and I was throwing punches, too, though my punches were not connecting. Two bouncers squeezed through the crowd and pulled us apart. I had two seconds to breathe before they pushed us back together for round two. I thought bouncers were supposed to stop fights and kick out the perpetrators, but these bouncers wanted more of the show. Punching, slapping, kicking. I couldn’t get my bearings: faces, lights, the floor, the ceiling, each a flash, like wayward images in an ill-edited movie. The bouncers pulled us apart again, and the girls disappeared into the crowd. No one asked me if I was OK, nor did they ask me to leave.
I looked for my “friends.” They stood with their backs to the wall, drinks in hand—watching, frowning. I stumbled over to them, wiping my face.
“Why didn’t you do anything?” I yelled over the music. I was livid. And drunk. And my shirt was torn.
“You can’t do that stuff when you’re with us,” one of the guys said. “I’m on probation, I can’t get into that.”
“I’ve got a weapons charge pending,” said the other guy. “You need to be more careful.”
The girl sipped her drink from a red straw. They walked me to the bathroom. My nose gushed; my right eye was red, the skin puffing taut like a grape. I found a cop sitting on a stool at the back door to the club.
“Some girls beat me up,” I told him, pointing in the direction of the fight.
“You can leave through this door right here,” he said, pointing to the metal door leading to the fire escape stairwell. No expression, no concern.
“Can you do something about it?” I screamed over the music.
“You’re free to leave,” he said.
I found my supposed friends again and asked Mr. Weapons Charge to take me home. I was too scared and shaken to walk home alone.
Poppy stepped out of his room wearing a long red nightgown as we rambled into the house. My parents were away on business, the one blessing of the night. I sat at the dining room table and cried as Poppy and Mr. Weapons Charge tried to console me. Poppy filled a plastic bag with ice and I held it against my eye as I sagged at the table.
“I should go,” said Mr. Weapons Charge. “You want to walk me out?”
Mr. Weapons Charge leaned out of his car window and grasped my forearm. “You shouldn’t invite people like me into your house,” he said. “Don’t do that again.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just don’t.” He released my arm. “You don’t know what someone can do.” He drove off into the night toward Baja Beach Club. I never saw him again.
I woke up with a black eye, my nose swollen shut, and bruises on my ribs and back. I looked at my reflection in the mirror, expecting to be horrified, but I smiled. I gave that girl a few good smacks, didn’t I? Then I thought about Mr. Weapons Charge. Poppy was right. I was more naive than I’d thought.
Chapter 12
On my twenty-fourth birthday, Poppy called me into the yard and handed me my birthday dove. Of course, I knew by now that this “dove” was really a white pigeon, but we pretended it was the international symbol of peace anyway. I cherished our birthday ritual, but this year I didn’t want to release the “dove.”
“I’ll keep her,” I told Poppy. I wanted to protect the bird—make sure she had a safe and happy life. I didn’t want her to become a star in the sky, floating in the emptiness with nowhere to perch.
“Let her fly, Chérie,” Poppy said. “She wants to be free.”
I felt sad holding the bird in my hands. I had anticipated her, and prepared a large flight cage for her new life with me—food and water already filling the dishes.
“You have so many birds.” Poppy put his arm around me and gestured above us. “Look at the sky, how big and beautiful. Let her go.”
I knew once I opened my hands, I couldn’t take the gesture back. I had so many bird-shaped scars on my heart, and I didn’t want another. I thought I might die if something as gentle as the breath from free-flying bird wings touched me.
“Where does my birthday dove go?” I asked Poppy, as I did every year, but this time I said it as an accusation, not a question. I wanted him to tell me the truth for once, that the dove wasn’t magic, that she was a fragile soul whose life could be extinguished with far less trouble than it took to create her.
“To the stars, of course,” he said. “You can see her every night if you want.”
“I don’t know if that’s true anymore.” I rubbed the warm bird onto my cheek and Poppy gently pushed my hands down.
“You are too old now to believe your Poppy?” He gazed over the water, his face sad, eyes cloudy.
I breathed deeply, closed my eyes, and launched the dove into the air with both hands. Her wings whistled as she left us, arcing to the right in a big curve and disappearing over the rooftops. I felt relieved, which surprised me. Something inside me healed a little.
“Happy birthday, Chérie,” Poppy said, clapping his hands. “May you have many, many more.”
* * *
When our lease ran out on the rental house in Fort Lauderdale, my parents, Poppy, and I moved to North Miami into another rental, away from Baja Beach Club, but closer to Florida International University’s north campus, where I continued taking creative writing classes after graduating with a bachelor’s in English and a minor in philosophy. Our new rental house sat on a wide waterway, similar to the waterway behind our hurricane house. Gone was the safety of a grassy backyard. I’d gaze over the waterway and imagine water breaching the seawall, forcing its way into the house with intent to drown us.
On the positive side, the house had a large, sunny patio, perfect for the birds, and a living room with an alcove, where I placed the cages for the larger birds. I had grown up in Miami, and was happy to be back.
Moving away from Baja Beach Club was good—staying out all night drinking was dangerous and a pathetic distraction from what I felt was truly important: the birds. I had acquired a prolific pair of rare—at the time—yellow Fischer’s lovebirds. The hen laid ten to twelve fertile eggs in a clutch, when the typical lovebird clutch is between four and six eg
gs. A pair on its own can’t raise that many babies. Most lovebirds have three to five babies hatch per clutch, a manageable number for good parents. Eggs are laid approximately two to three days apart, and the mother begins sitting on the eggs to incubate them after the third egg is laid, give or take an egg or two. The first eggs cool and stop developing until the mother resumes incubation.
For a lovebird pair with ten viable eggs, the first baby could be more than seven days older than the last baby, leaving the last babies at a great disadvantage. A seven-day-old lovebird is enormous compared to a hatchling, and most of the little ones are crushed to death, cast aside, or buried. In the case of a clutch of five viable eggs, I’d pull the first two babies from the nest and start hand-feeding them about the time the fourth and fifth babies hatched, giving the entire clutch a chance to thrive.
It’s also challenging for the parents to warm a clutch of ten to twelve eggs. Some of the eggs will break, be pushed aside, or not be warmed as well as the others. If I wanted this pair’s babies to survive, I would have to pull the first six eggs from the nest and incubate them myself. I invested in a forty-dollar Styrofoam incubator from a feed store and learned how to use it.
I hadn’t wanted to incubate eggs, like some of my bird-breeding colleagues did. I liked having the parents raise the babies until they were about two weeks old. I’d pull them from the nest and hand-raise them after their eyes had opened.
The working theory in bird circles is that the babies should see the parents when they first open their eyes. The babies bond to humans better this way. Many parrot species are genetically programmed to move away from their family when they reach maturity so they can breed within a diverse genetic pool. If they stay nearby, they risk breeding with a sibling or other relation. Birds raised with their parents first, then a human, are affectionate and sweet. Lovebirds incubated and hand-fed from day one are tame, but tend to be willful and bratty toward humans, and are fierce breeders, unafraid of human hands.
After pulling the eggs from the nest, I gently pencil marked an X on one side of each egg and an O on the opposite side, then placed them all onto the fine wire mesh at the bottom of the incubator. I poured some water into the water channels below the grate to keep the eggs’ environment humid. I turned the incubator to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and let it heat slowly, so the eggs didn’t experience thermal shock.
Every couple hours, when the eggs were young, I’d open the clear plastic hatch at the top of the incubator and turn the eggs halfway from the X side to the O side, and later, from O to X, and later another quarter turn, and so on. The developing chicks’ circulatory systems require the eggs to be turned, and this also prevents the chicks from sticking to the eggs, which would kill them. If I wasn’t home to turn the eggs, Poppy did it for me.
I ordered a candler for ten bucks from an ad in Bird Talk magazine. A candler is the avian version of an ultrasound machine. This one was a small, thin flashlight with a long, flexible neck and a pinpoint of cool light at the end. All eggs appear the same on the outside; but with eggs, as with romance, the inside makes all the difference. Placing a candler onto an egg gives an X-ray view into the hard womb.
Infertile eggs are usually lemony yellow inside, called “clear” in bird-breeding terminology. The yolk might be darker, but for the most part, nothing of interest is happening there, and nothing ever will.
The beginning of a fertile egg has a black pinprick inside. Clear eggs were disappointing for me, but that one black spot represented a bit of hope, a speck full of possibility.
As the embryo develops, red veins spider out of the black spot and grow over the inside of the egg’s shell like a vine taking over the side of a building. An air cell at the large end of the egg expands, creating a hollow space between the material inside the egg and the shell. Within four days, the veins would lead to a murky spot within the egg—the developing baby.
By now, the chick would have a beating heart. In two more days it would have legs and wings, and by nine days it would start to resemble a bird. I couldn’t see this inside the shell—just a spot becoming darker and thicker.
Sometimes the eggs would develop a hairline fracture and I’d cautiously paint clear nail polish over the crack to seal it and keep bacteria from entering the egg and killing the baby. I tended to the eggs as vigilantly as a mother bird.
By day twenty, the air cell would draw down, indicating healthy chicks inside the eggs preparing to hatch. Some chicks kicked inside their shells, sending the eggs rolling all over the incubator, restless to hatch.
Sometimes the chicks didn’t kick inside the egg, and I questioned whether they were still alive. At a late stage, the candler showed just a dark, unmoving mass inside the egg. Dr. Z told me that you can tell if a chick is alive by floating the egg in water, so I filled a bowl with lukewarm water and placed the questionable eggs inside. Within a few seconds the eggs bobbed up and down, doing laps around the bowl, the living chicks inside gathering the strength to pip the shell.
Somewhere between day twenty-one and twenty-four, my lovebird eggs woke me in the middle of the night. The eggs were cheeping. I hadn’t known that eggs talked. I picked them up one by one and found that two of them were crying with a volume usually reserved for birds, not eggs. I placed them back into the incubator and hunched over it all night, staring through the plastic door until past dawn, as the first chick used its egg tooth—a small, sharp, temporary triangle of bone on its beak—to pierce the egg, and struggled to force itself out into the world, with nothing but the power of will, one chip at a time. It was the most amazing enterprise I’d ever seen, like stillness and ecstasy in a boxing match.
Dr. Z told me not to help a chick hatch unless it seemed in trouble, so I resisted the urge to pick at the eggs with a toothpick, which I had been instructed to do if a chick didn’t hatch within a few hours of starting—and which I’d do many times in the future. Hatching looks grueling, but it helps to develop the chick’s neck muscles and respiratory system.
Over the next few days, all six of the eggs hatched into squirming, wriggling pink babies. I placed them into a plastic bowl with paper towels in the bottom so they wouldn’t hurt themselves on the incubator’s wire grate as they hatched, and I raised the incubator’s temperature to 100 degrees Fahrenheit—the babies needed extra warmth to dry. They all had egg sacs attached to their bellies, where their belly buttons would be if they were people, kind of like placentas; the egg sacs fed them for the first two hours of their lives. Once the egg sac dried, I had to start feeding them myself.
The newborns needed to be fed every hour around the clock for the first two days, then every two hours for the next four days, then every three hours for the week after that. Parrots are “altricial,” helpless when they’re born, eyes closed, dependent on their parents—or me—for survival, unlike chicken and duck chicks, which are “precocial,” born with eyes open and the ability to walk and find food.
The first feedings consisted of one drop of slightly warmed Pedialyte, and after that, Pedialyte mixed with a smidge of commercially prepared hand-feeding formula. I was delirious after a few days of little sleep, but had to set my alarm every two hours to wake up and feed the babies, and couldn’t leave the house for more than an hour at a time. One of my friends at the bird club was incubating birds at the same time, and we joked about the Dunkin’ Donuts commercial running at the time where the groggy baker stumbles out of bed early in the morning and slurs, “Time to make the doughnuts.” We’d say, in the same intonation, “Time to feed the doughnuts.” I’d fall back into bed until I had to wake again in what felt like a nanosecond.
Watching the “doughnuts” grow was the real miracle. After a few days I removed them from the incubator and placed them in a plastic container with a heating pad beneath it. They morphed from uncoordinated pink squiggles to blind, prehistoric-looking creatures sitting up in their paper towel nest, gaining control of their necks and feet, helpless changelings growing at an astonishing pace. Th
eir eyes opened at about two weeks, first one, then the other, and I welcomed them to the world and told them I was their mama.
Around this time I pulled their six siblings from underneath their parents. Pulling the babies gave the parents a break. Laying and incubating eggs and raising young is a hard job, and it can deplete the parents’ resources and the calcium in the mother’s bones.
The first time I pulled babies from the nest I thought it was cruel, but the other bird breeders at the club said the parents soon forget about the babies, and that did seem to be the case. After a few minutes the parents behaved as if the babies had never existed, but I wondered if that was what we wanted to believe. We’d never know what kind of panic the mother felt entering her nest and finding her babies missing.
The parent-raised babies were larger, and their growth seemed more advanced than my hand-fed babies, though they were about the same age. I decided to incubate only when necessary, when parents had too many viable eggs, or were known to break their eggs or kill their babies.
I was exhausted by the time the Fischer’s babies were on four feedings a day at about four weeks; I couldn’t handle back-to-back incubation. I needed time off until the next batch—and I needed a drink—so I took the prolific parents’ nest away. The hen laid an egg in her food dish, so I moved the pair to a cage with a wire bottom so they couldn’t access paper anymore, which they used as nesting material. I put the egg into the incubator in case it was fertile.
Without Baja Beach Club around the corner, I didn’t drink as much as I had in Fort Lauderdale. At least, not at first, though I thought about alcohol all the time. I also didn’t want a repeat of the bar fight. I’d glimpsed something in myself I didn’t like that night: alcohol could control me.
But my resolution to lighten up on the drinking didn’t last. I met a writer/bartender in a fiction-writing workshop who asked me on a date, and we quickly became a couple. I’d sit at the outdoor bar in Coconut Grove where my new boyfriend worked and he’d mix drinks for me I’d never tried. I had my first chocolate martini. No more margaritas for me. Tequila equaled bar fights and the disintegration of control. Now I was a vodka drinker, along with beer and wine, both of which could barely be considered booze.
The Bird Market of Paris Page 11