Read Online The Bird Market of Paris by Nikki Moustaki - Free Book Online Page A

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 more 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.
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œGreen plus yellow doesn’t equal pied?”
    â€œThere 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