The Bird Market of Paris (15 page)

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 eggs. 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. Their 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.

I fell in with a group of writers who felt like real friends, including the handsome poet Richard Blanco, whom I met in Campbell McGrath's poetry workshop and would become my closest friend. We'd bond over poetry, martinis, and nights on South Beach, cruising Collins Avenue in his convertible white Mazda Miata with the top down.

A couple of the other writers bartended, too, and my writer/bartender boyfriend and I would score free shots all night. I discovered that drinking was cool if you were a writer. All the great writers were lushes. I took pride in it. The more I drank, the better a writer I'd become. It had worked for Ernest Hemingway and Dylan Thomas, right?

One night, early in my relationship with the writer/bartender, sleeping off a couple pitchers of beer, a strange noise rose in a dream and I tried to push it away. I didn't want to float to consciousness, but the noise roused me. It was coming from the incubator. Cheeping.

I peered inside the incubator. There were two babies. Was I still drunk? There had been
one
egg from the yellow Fisher's pair. The top and the bottom of one egg were on the incubator's grate, along with two pink, wriggly chicks. I'd had twins. They were tiny—much smaller than regular babies—but they were complaining loudly and performing somersaults.

I didn't even know that lovebird twins happened. I couldn't wait to call my friends from the bird club and Dr. Z. I raised the temperature in the incubator, fed the babies a drop of Pedialyte with an eyedropper, and nestled them into a cup of paper towels. I set my alarm clock for one hour.

My alarm rang in what seemed like a minute. Time to feed the doughnuts. I opened the incubator and found that one of the babies was still alive, but the other had perished in the hour I'd been asleep. I checked the incubator temperature. I'd done everything correctly. I examined the dead chick, and found a layer of skin stretched over each of his eye sockets. He hadn't developed eyes.

I cradled the dead twin in my hand, tiptoed to Poppy's door, and knocked gently. He cleared his throat and turned on his nightstand lamp as I entered his room.

“Poppy, I had twins, and one of my birdies died.” I was speaking like a little girl.

“What,
Chérie
? What time is it? Are you OK?”

“My baby is dead.”

Poppy peered at the chick in my hand and propped himself up on the headboard. “You are sad for this baby?”

I told him I was. He patted his bed and I sat down beside him.

“You are like a farmer,
Chérie
. On a farm, many animals die. You cannot cry for each one.” He held up both of his hands, palms facing the ceiling. “
Merci, mon Dieu
, thanks to God for taking this baby instead of one of us.”

I hadn't thought of myself as a farmer. The idea intensified my sadness. I didn't share Poppy's practical nature. I mourned each death equally. I'd had many unfortunate deaths in my flock and cried for each one, but this was the first death from my incubator. This one felt even more personal.

“What do I do now?” I asked Poppy, staring at the tiny dead baby in the middle of my palm.