tuesday 12 april 2011
No, she wasn't named after the French queen who said "if the poor have no bread, let them eat cake," and was ultimately guillotined by the proletariat. Why would I name one of my animals after someone like that? No, her name came about as the result of a traumatic event in her life.
In September of 1992, when Antoinette was a little over a year old (and I'm ashamed to say I hadn't yet named her), I let her and all the other little zebra finches out of their cages for their play. The larger birds got their turns on different days. This was a long-established routine in our family, and had always gone reasonably well. Among the larger birds who watched while the little ones had their play were some lovebirds, who, as I've said elsewhere, are notorious biters of feet and legs. But there had never been any serious injuries, and I had come into a complacency that believed there never WOULD be.
I had checked on the finches a couple of times and found nothing amiss. But when I went in to round them up and get them back into their cages, I found blood. Blood on a windowill, on the window, and a number of other things. It was a LOT of blood, when you consider that a zebra finch only weighs about an ounce and can lose a life-threatening amount of blood very quickly. And birds can go into shock very easily as well.
Having found all the blood, I still had to find the bird that was producing it. Several finches were hunted, caught in my hand, and examined before I found the right one. A little off-white girl without a name. And there it was. A leg, I'm pretty sure it was the right, bitten very high up near the hip. Bitten NEARLY clean through, but not quite, and dangling by a very thin thread of what? Skin? Tendon? I wasn't sure. The thread was so infinitessimally thin that I hoped the thing would just break off on its own.
This was a Saturday afternoon. My mother was staying the weekend with my daughter and me, but it was no ordinary visit. We had big plans. Big for US, at least. On Sunday we were heading off very early in the morning for a bus trip to the Bronx Zoo. This trip had been planned for months, and my mother had paid for most of it because I was a poor single mom out of work, and we were all three looking forward to it. A big day out for mother, daughter and granddaughter.
It's agonizing for me when I have to choose between an animal and the humans, and I almost always decide in favor of the animal, but this time was different. I was willing to ruin my OWN trip to the zoo (but not exactly happy about it) by calling the vet, having my mother take me and bird over there, and using my zoo spending money to pay the extra for an emergency vet appointment for this bird. But as I thought about these things all that afternoon and evening, I found I wasn't willing to risk ruining the trip for my mother and daughter. If the vet had said the bird needed to be watched very closely for a couple of days, and needed this or that medication every four hours, I would have stayed home from the zoo, and I doubt that the others would have gone without me. I was the mediator between them. And even if they had gone, they wouldn't have had a very good time without that mediation.
So I took care of my bird myself, keeping her very warm, putting antibiotic in her water and making her drink little bits of it through a dropper, until early on Sunday morning when we had to leave. I left her with huge reluctance, fearing to find a dead bird when I returned. I put on a good front for mother and daughter all day, and of course I did enjoy the zoo. But in my mind every few minutes all day long and into the night: is she all right? is she still alive?
Late Sunday night we got back. She was still alive. She was warm and eating and managing to move from perch to dishes with this dangling leg, but it wasn't easy. Next day she went to the vet, but there wasn't an opening until the afternoon, so every hour of waiting seemed like three.
That leg just has to come off. There's no fixing it. This from the vet. I start asking quetions. When can you do it, what do you use for anesthetic, bla bla. Vet says we'll just do it right now. It's just a snip and a stitch on the little stump. No anesthetic for a brid this small. We'll wrap her in a towel and that will keep her dark and calm until it's finshed. There are very few nerve endings in a bird's leg.
I paced the parking lot smoking cigarettes, certain that that tiny little bird had already had way too much stress, and that being held and wrapped and snipped by strangers would just finish her off. Heart attack of the massive type. This is a very easy thing to happen to a bird, death from stress.
She, my plucky little soldier, did not die. She seemed, in fact, extremely happy that that dangling thing had been taken away. There was no post-op infection or faiing, the stitch was removed when it was time (and I think I did it myself), and all ended happily. As I watched her through the remaining five and a half years of her life, I did so with enormous pride in her survival, her courage through massive blood loss and stress and strangers and snipping and stitiching. Not to mention the compensations a bird with one leg needs to make in order to balance and jump.
Overall I'm a depressive, cynical, serious individual. There is not a long list of things in this life that cause me to feel joyful, but seeing animals overcome obstacles is right at the top of that list. I feel that joy every single time I watch that animal overcoming that obstacle, and so it was with this little bird. The same is not true of humans. You don't like reading that, I'm sure, and think me an unappealing shit, I'm sure, but it's the way I was made. Animals have always been fascinating and loveable and desirable to me, whereas humans are difficult,nasty and unreliable.
The year before the biting of the little bird leg, this same vet had amputated the leg of a guinea pig I had who was called Tony. At the end of the bird amputation, we were setting up a file for the little finch, and the vet asked her name. She doesn't have one. Let's call her Antonia, after your other amputee. So the file was set up for Antonia the finch. Over the next week or so, I decided I liked Antoinette better, and that's what I always called her. Antoinetti, to be precise.
And that's how she got her name. Because a lovebird bit her leg nearly off, and this bite resulted in amputation, and a guinea pig who'd ALSO had an amputation was called Tony. A circuitous and odd route to something as routine as a name.
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read... Stolen stars... Mugsy's book
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(fairy at www.toscano.com)
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