The story of a lost pigeon.
Recently going through old computer files and ran across something I wrote ten years ago (during the height of Iraq War anxiety, as you might glean from the content).
I know I e-mailed it to my usual people, but I don’t see any indication I posted it anywhere, at least anywhere that survived.
In the years since I wrote this, I’ve become a little more jaded about assuming other people take good care of their animals, and lot less happy about using the word “owner.” But the general sentiments remain.
0353 and the Way Home
Last week the downstairs neighbor knocked on our door. When I opened the door, he held up a box and said in his slight accent, “I found a baby bird.”
Apparently we have now become the people to whom one brings lost birds. It’s not the worst reputation one could acquire.
I looked in the cardboard box he held, and there was a full-sized pigeon! We invited him in, closed our own parrots in their cages (generating a stream of protest chirps), and took the pigeon into another room for quarantine purposes (bird diseases are a very serious issue, and we’re solidly in the West Nile virus hot zone this year).
She is definitely someone’s pigeon. She has a leg band number (0353) showing the initials of her owner’s pigeon club, and a hatch date. Our neighbor was right to call her a “baby” after all; she can’t be older than 4 months, despite her size.
Of course little 0353 is beautiful. Thick glossy feathers with overtones of iridescent purple and green on her head and neck, fading into businesslike charcoal-and-gray wings and some handsome spots and bars on her flanks. Richly red eyes. Her stubby tail is perfectly shaped and clean. She might be a tad thin, but it’s been a while since I’ve felt a pigeon’s breastbone, so I could be wrong.
0353 is charmingly tame. We handed her back and forth like a little football, and despite being restrained around her body and wings (most prey animals can’t stand that, not even our hand-raised cockatiels permit it without a fight) she put up no more resistance than a muffin, looking placidly about and cocking her head at us.
She’d been very lost. She sat under a bench in front of our building all day according to our neighbor, and she did not resist being picked up. She seems a little bewildered. She’s probably cold and she acted hungry. Her home pigeon club is about 30 miles away; I contacted the club secretary (Googled him right up from the band info and had him on the phone in 5 minutes!) so that we could reunite her with her handler soon.
My wife likes pigeons generally, and she was in love with 0353. It was hard for her to stop cuddling our visitor.
We decided not to keep the pigeon in our place for fear of contagion, but we had a spare cage (imperfectly sized but good for the short run) and a bag of cracked corn and wild birdseed, as well as some oyster shell grit (necessary for pigeons but not for parrots, who hull their seeds; I’m not sure why we have any, but it was handy). 0353 knew exactly what to do with the cracked corn and chowed down heroically. We gave the neighbor basic instructions on keeping 0353 alive and helped him carry all the new gear back to his place.
There’s a little more to the story. The spare cage we put 0353 in used to belong to Cheerio, our first cockatiel. He died tragically last September, but he has passed along more than his empty cage. He too was a foundling, a tame bird originally native to Australia. He was lost and scared in the wooded mountains of America when he sought the attention of my wife’s co-worker, who took him in and later gave him to us. I was dubious at first, but Cheerio visibly overcame his own fear to make friends with us, and turned us into the kind of people to whom the neighbors bring little lost feathered things. Without Cheerio’s presence having affected our lives, the neighbor wouldn’t have thought of us as “those bird people”, wouldn’t have known what to do about 0353, might never have bothered. Our baby is gone, but someone else’s has been rescued.
Today someone from the pigeon-fancier club is coming to pick up 0353, so we’ve brought her back to our place (my wife will be home) and kept her since last night, watching her coo and cock her head. She’s gorgeously healthy-looking.
There are many things happening in the world that are more important. War, terror, and disease dominate our news; murder, greed, and environmental destruction are only temporarily taking a back seat. Cynicism and fear rule our conversations. These are serious issues. Perhaps I am foolish for being so moved by the plight of one lost pigeon.
So be it. Of all the things that will happen today, this one will end well. A life saved; a homecoming.