We were very sad, of course. But I pulled myself together and acted like a conservation breeder. I ordered a necropsy; it showed nothing. We later bought an oxygen tank for Pandemonium so that I’d never have to be separated from an ailing rare baby again. I’m convinced now that it was a mistake taking Peep far away; he might have died anyway, but nobody can keep a vigil better and with a closer eye than a pair of doting parents, albeit human stand-ins.
SIX YEARS AFTER that first pair of green-naped pheasant pigeons arrived mysteriously by mail, I still had hopes for breeding those inscrutable birds. Though they were not officially listed as endangered, virtually none had been seen in recent years in New Guinea, and their distinctive call had seldom been heard. The lack of information on their habits was frustrating. I tried varying their habitat, moving them around to different aviaries in the hopes that one of them would provide the right mix of space, light, greenery, and privacy for them to raise a baby. Like Victoria crowneds, GNPPs lay a single egg that they incubate for a month. Unless they feel comfortable in an aviary, they don’t even attempt to nest. Finally I had an aviary built just for them in one of the few private areas left in our backyard.
Once the birds were settled, finding the right nest box became the next challenge. Not a single bird keeper that I consulted had ever raised a GNPP, and most declined to offer suggestions on what to try. One breeder told me that he had heard it was necessary to provide a loosely woven platform about three feet off the ground. I didn’t know how to weave one, but I was determined to try.
First, I tried grass hay. I carried it into the aviary in an old weather-beaten wooden fruit box. Years earlier, I had found it in the crook of a tree, abandoned after a long-ago harvest. The pear and apple farms were gone before our neighborhood was developed. The box was a sort only found in antique shops or flea markets these days. In the midst of constructing the ledge to hold the woven platform, I was called away. I left the hay-filled box on its side. When I returned the next day to resume building, the green-napeds had already claimed the box as their nesting site.
An old fruit box is now the standard nest box for the GNPPs. They will use only a fruit box that is completely solid and has the original wood. Attach new wood slats to fix a broken old box, and the birds will reject it. The ledge it sits on is also important. I never did figure out how to construct a ledge that was not solid, yet was strong enough to support birds and the fruit box. I suspect that the breeder’s suggestion for a woven platform had more to do with the GNPP’s infamous startle response than with nesting. If one were startled on the ground below the nest and jumped straight up, impact with a solid wood ledge might kill the bird by breaking its neck or back.
Weaving a platform proved impossible, so I positioned solid wooden ledges just right—not so high that the birds would refuse it, but not so low as to present a danger to a frightened bird below. Nothing about keeping these birds is easy. I had to move slowly around them in the aviary and keep my distance because they are so fearful of people. Lancelot, one of our original pair, was pretty relaxed around me, but the newer pair in our GNPP flock seemed happier if left to themselves.
Despite their acceptance of the fruit box nest, nothing much was succeeding within. It wasn’t for lack of trying. We had nine failures, some parent-incubated in the nest, and some with eggs I’d tried to incubate. Then, late in 2011, I found an abandoned egg. It was a forlorn sight. I was beginning to fear that the birds had finally given up. I might have thrown in the towel as well were it not for another of those mysterious “aha” moments born of coincidence.
One morning I had been reading some literature on GNPPs that I had finally been able to dig up. I learned that babies hatched in the wild were born during the rainiest season—in the rain forest. I thought about it: our weather was so much drier that humidity levels must be inadequate for the formation of a healthy, viable eggshell. I was pondering this later that day when I had a phone call from an exultant zookeeper. One of the first GNPP babies hatched in a decade had just been born at his zoo. The zoo’s GNPP parents had chosen a small rock ledge near a waterfall as their nesting site. Bingo! With that information and what I’d read earlier, I was convinced that low humidity was the reason for our birds’ many failures. With a sinking heart, I took a hard look at the greenhouse that held my beloved orchids, the result of thirty years’ collecting and propagating. Tending them had been a joy. As the collection grew, I had installed an automatic misting system—just the thing for our rain forest nesters.
Out went the orchids—given away, for the most part, though a few favorites still “board” in a local orchid grower’s vast greenhouse. I rationalized my loss. Tending the plants weekly had become too much of a luxury, given the birds’ demands at that point. In went the GNPPs. And on went the misting system, especially during very dry spells. When the birds were nesting again, I kept track of the temperature and rainfall and adjusted the greenhouse humidity carefully.
I had vowed not to check on the sitting birds too often, but I couldn’t contain my curiosity. I wouldn’t go into the aviary; I’d just take a quick peek from outside. At the very least, I hoped to see a broken eggshell on the ground, which would tell me whether the egg had hatched. There was no sign of an empty shell or a baby, and it was well past time. I was terribly disappointed, but I felt worse for the birds—until I saw her. The ungainly little baby had been in the nest box, as quiet and shy as her parents. The secretive GNPPs had actually hidden the broken eggshell under some bedding on the nesting shelf—perhaps an instinctive behavior to avoid tipping predators to the presence of a tasty young fledgling.
I’ll admit it. I loved making the phone call.
“Louis! We did it! We have a green-naped baby. And she’s fine!”
Her parents took excellent care of her, and the baby thrived. We named her Mitzi.
SHE WAS A quiet little bird, but her arrival made considerable noise in aviculture circles. Then a second GNPP baby arrived. We named her Peka, after a river in Papua New Guinea. Overall, 2011 – 12 was a year of amazing gains for Pandemonium’s conservation mission. We had overseen live births of two rare species that most zoos and the best private breeders couldn’t manage, and with very minimal resources. As a relatively new nonprofit, we had some measurable results to show potential donors. Our website crowed the new baby news—and our mission statement called for greater conservation efforts. With Pandemonium’s enhanced profile, our first big fund raiser—a garden and aviary tour we called the Victoria Crown Affair—was a great success.
For me, still spattered with bird poop and piloting my pickup to haul ever more seed, those first successful births brought a bit of sweet validation. I was being taken seriously by zoo aviculturists; once-dismissive breeders were now calling me when they were looking for birds and advice. We have opened our aviaries to visiting zoo officials, aviculture societies, educators, and breeders. I also share what I have learned as the conservation columnist for the Avicultural Society of America’s bulletin and as a speaker at professional conferences.
The small, private moments, though, still hold the most satisfaction. The best times are the mornings, when it’s just me and the birds. A year after Mitzi’s hatching, I found myself sneaking around outside the greenhouse once again. I suspect I’ll always be nervous and impatient when awaiting new life. I rubbed a spot on the dusty window to see the nest box within.
Mitzi, hale and hearty, was going to be a mom. Our GNPP flock has gone from two to eighteen—the largest in the world. I know it’s way too soon for celebration; there is so much that can and probably will go wrong. But I am also coming to realize that in our efforts to understand birds and partner with them, meaningful advances don’t necessarily come in big leaps. As I learned from Oscar the finch when we built the ladder, no matter how high the aspirations, progress comes in incremental steps. Yes, bird by bird.
EPILOGUE
I may have been trembling just a bit as the stagehand adjusted my wireless mike. I p
eered out beyond the lights and saw rows of expectant young faces filling the auditorium at the Castilleja School in Palo Alto. Just offstage, Fanny, one of our Victoria crowned pigeons, sat calmly in her cage, awaiting her star turn.
I was about to deliver a TEDx talk, a version of the live conference and Internet-streamed TED talks in technology, entertainment, and design (hence TED) dedicated to “ideas worth spreading.” Addressing a potentially global audience—my talk would be on the website—was a long, long way from cradling that injured dove on the highway.
How would I get my backyard odyssey into the six-minute limit? What message did I want to give this audience, which included a lot of kids? Did I dare tell them my most outrageous dream? It’s so crucial to impress upon the planet’s next stewards the scope and urgency of conservation. Education is one of the key platforms in Pandemonium’s mission statement. Yet when I had approached many elementary and middle schools in the San Francisco Peninsula offering a free enrichment program on endangered species—complete with exotic live birds like Fanny—not a single principal accepted, though some seemed regretful. The most common excuse: We’re so busy “teaching to the test” that we have no time. Wish we did. Thanks anyhow.
What luck to be reaching out to young people and others, in a format they were receptive to: a birdcentric download! The talks are videotaped before a live audience. When the red lights blinked atop the cameras, I began: “Today I’m going to talk to you about saving animals. . . . Who was the world’s first conservationist?”
I recapped the story of Noah and his species-saving ark. “Noah,” I told them, “has no animal-saving skills. . . . Nowhere does it say he even likes animals. But he’s a good person. He does it because it’s the right thing to do.”
And the purpose of an ark? It’s like other boats in appearance and in the materials used to build it. The difference between an ark and other boats is its function. Other boats are designed to take you safely to someplace new. The purpose of an ark? It’s to keep you safe while the world around you becomes new.
Noah’s biblical world was transformed by a flood. Our present-day ecological changes are the inventions of man. I clicked the slide projector to show a sixteenth-century rendering of an odd-looking bird and asked the students to consider the dodo, rendered extinct in just eighty years after the boats of Portuguese colonists landed on Mauritius. Dodoes were hunted and forced from their habitat by the incursion of palm oil plantations, which destroyed the forests.
Suddenly there was a collective intake of breath, a chorus of oohs. Owing to a slight miscue, the stagehands had wheeled Fanny onstage a bit prematurely. The sight of that strange, beautiful blue creature always startles people. When things quieted down, I went on to relate the sad parallel fate of the Victoria crowned pigeon: now the world’s largest pigeon, more hunting, more palm oil plantations, more habitat destruction . . .
“Sound familiar?” I asked the darkened room.
There are very few birds of Fanny’s species left in captivity, I explained. Pandemonium has the second-largest flock in the world. But there is no comprehensive program—yet—to try to save them. I told the students about the Louis Browns of the bird world, knowledgeable types who are pretty endangered as well: “These birds are in the hands of a small group of breeders. They’re old, and when they die, the birds are sold at auction or given to friends and they’re effectively lost. What’s also tragic is that the knowledge these breeders have accumulated over their lifetimes is also lost.”
I told them the story of Pandemonium. I clicked on a slide of the green-naped pheasant pigeon whose death had caused her mate to cry, and I conveyed my shock at finding out that there are only thirty-two known birds of his kind left in all the world’s zoos.
“I discovered that once-common birds were going extinct in the wild,” I said. “They were rare in captivity. And without my realizing it, my backyard had become an ark.”
I wasn’t claiming biblical import; I used the ark analogy to convey the oceans of problems and the tough odds facing our little operation. I explained our change in direction from a one-to-one rescue group to a nonprofit with the global mission to save lots of birds from extinction. I rolled out my dream: Pandemonium has a conservation plan called ARC—Avian Recovery for Conservation—that just might save the birds and the knowledge to raise more of them. If, that is, we can raise the money to fund it. We want to save the aviculture secrets before the master breeders die, before the birds are dispersed.
“We will set up little arks,” I said, adding that we’re looking at land and locations in different parts of the country. We’ll buy the flocks before they’re dispersed and let them stay with the breeders, have apprentices learn what they do, and then document it. When the breeders pass on, the birds will go into conservancy in ARC facilities.
By the time I finished outlining my hopes beyond Pandemonium, my time was up. I asked the audience a final question: “If you lived in the sixteen hundreds and had the chance, would you have saved the dodo?”
I drove home with Fanny, feeling pretty good. The bird was dozing after her resplendent performance. My mind shifted back to the purely practical: another load of seed to pick up, a new intern to train, and then some research about our homegrown mealworms, which seemed to be escaping from their box no matter what I used. Ah, the glamorous life. There was also a volunteer meeting about conducting a tour of Pandemonium for a summer enrichment camp for disadvantaged city children. Their counselors always ask us to invite the kids. We always have a ball.
WEEKS LATER, THE kids arrived. Three vans pulled up, and a gaggle of four-, five-, and six-year-olds tumbled out into our driveway. Their camp counselors were already on “shhhhh” patrol.
“Use your inside voices around the birds, guys!”
“Calm down, the birds are waiting for you.”
The campers knew all about us from the older children who had come last summer, and from their counselors, who had been preparing them with avian-centered books and stories and a construction project. They brought us two birdhouses to hang in the redwood trees in the front yard, where gift houses from previous camp groups still held the wispy straw remnants of this spring’s nests.
And so it comes and goes around in our backyard—the circle of life. the Lion King song by that title is a Tico-approved Disney tune. He loved to slow-dance to it with me back in the day—almost as much as he swooned for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” Tico, “my” special bird, may be lost to me—he only has eyes for Mylie now—and I’ve adjusted to that. On the morning of the tour, I only hoped he’d be on his best behavior for the children.
I had been in the kitchen when I heard the vans pull up. I was arranging a platter of bird-shaped cookies I had baked—at 4:00 a.m. I had complied with a small request from the last tour (“Add some chocolate chips? Please?”). I was tired, but I knew the visitors would be an energy boost for me and all our volunteer staff. I was also keenly aware that I was flouting Pandemonium’s new “official policy” of remaining closed to the public except for special events like fund raisers and private tours for potential donors.
It’s the right policy. Birds need privacy to raise their families. And for me, time spent with tour groups is time taken from the birds themselves and the mound of administrative work that our nonprofit status and conservation work now generate. But I couldn’t tell these children no. It had become a tradition that we all looked forward to. It’s likely that very few of these campers had computers at home to watch Pandemonium informational videos on our website, let alone a TEDx talk. And anyway, live birds are immediate, captivating, and above all a treat. Better still, they’re a living, yawping lesson in ecology that won’t easily slide from antsy kindergartners’ or first graders’ memories.
This event always takes a lot of preparation, from training volunteers to take the children around and talk about the birds to clearing out my refrigerator for the gallons of milk we’ll be serving. Everyone was rushing around and a b
it frazzled, and worse, the parrots were cranky. We’d had to skip dance time that morning. They don’t care for disruption in their routine, and they all let me have it in their own way as I moved them, one by one, to their outdoor aviaries:
Mia Bird, the African gray parrot, looked me straight in the eye and commanded, “Focus!”
“Come here! Want out!” Shana commanded in the deep Darth Vader voice she saves for her darkest moods.
Amigo just wouldn’t budge. He refused to get on my arm and muttered stormily to himself. Finally I found a stick for a perch and prodded his belly gently with it, and he grudgingly stepped up.
What was the deal with these guys? We needed them. We had cordoned off some outlying aviaries where birds were nesting. This meant the companion birds would be the main attraction for the tour. Had the kids come all the way here to get the cold shoulder from a circle of petulant psittacines? The din was growing as the camp group made its way through the center path.
Thank heaven for nosy, possessive Ferguson, the African crane. He spied the children from his high perch and spread his magnificent wings, then jumped up and down in his customary display of territorial dominance. The kids took his aggressive posturing as a grand welcome. There were squeals from below.
“He’s ginormous!”
Some of the children stepped right up to the wire mesh for a better look as Ferguson flew down to inspect the interlopers. Others hung back. At ground level, the bird looked twice as tall as some of the children.
The Birds of Pandemonium Page 16