tuesday 3 may 2011
Again I find myself irritated by a failure of memory: I cannot recall in exactly which year Zachary and his two sisters, Síle and Julie, were born. 1995? 96? One of the two, but it both irritates and saddens me that I can’t remember precisely which. He died on Tuesday the first of May in 2001 — that I remember. I wish I had such accurate internal files for his birth.
With his death came the end not only of Zachary the individual, but of a ten-year family of zebra finches (and one spice finch) that had begun in early 1991 with Zachary’s grandparents, Juliet and Romi. I had meant to get Zachary a wife and continue the family
way back in 1998, when I moved to Turners Fails for a second time. Meant to and meant to, but never got around to it (swimming in trauma and anxiety and stress as I was from other things that were going on) until it was too late. By the time I bought him a young wife, his life was already ending.
He was the dark grey variety of zebra, and he had a little birth defect. On, I’m fairly sure, his right foot, two of his toes were missing their final segment, and so they were too short. This never seemed to hamper his ability to stand or perch, and he was eventually dubbed my Zachary-zachariah-with-the-funny-toes. He also tended to be a bit of a bully. Frequently I had to shuffle him from one finch cage to another, as someone he was rooming with would start to show signs of stress, and I knew who was behind it. It’s not that he ever hurt the other birds by wounding them in any way; that wasn’t his style. He was the psychological bully — the kind I’m so familiar with from the human realm. Zachary would decide to be a damned noodge and pester his victim when they tried to eat, or perch somewhere, or have a little friendship with yet another bird. He’d chatter at them menacingly or squeeze right up beside them, letting his target know that he wanted the very spot they were in. When it got to the point that I had only three finches, I couldn’t cage them all together because of Zachary. There had to be one cage for his sister and one for his uncle, and he himself would have to be moved from one to the other when he began to be too much of a pain. And it would all start over. Sweetness and light and bonding for several months, and then the bullying. Why didn’t I give him a cage all to himself? With almost any other of my birds, I could have done that. But my bird magazines had taught me years before, and I saw it for myself once or twice when I had a lone finch after the death of a cage-mate: finches don’t like to be alone. They just don’t do well. I do believe I tried once or twice to have Zachary live alone, in defiance of what I’d learned in my magazines, because I thought, in light of his bullying, that he might be a very non-usual finch who would prefer to have a private home. But no, depression and despondency would descend. Chatter would almost disappear and eating became uninteresting. For his own survival, he had to live with other birds. And for their survival, he had to be moved on a regular basis.
When I finally got him his new wife, he was failing. He was the last finch left after the death of his uncle Pepper, and I hoped that finch loneliness would turn out to be what was ailing him. And he did in fact rally very well for about twelve days after Juliana arrived. They had side-by-side cages for a few days so that they could get acquainted before being made to share a household, and he seemed absolutely delighted with her. I think he really was. But it was just too late. He was either too old or too ill with something, or both, to keep going. When they had their shared cage and their nest box and their pile of nesting material, he was very happy, and started things off in great style. It’s the job of the male finch to bring the materials to the nest for the female to arrange. For a couple of days he did his job dutifully. But then he began to stand in front of the nesting stuff with a confused look on his face, and it seemed for all the world that he was thinking: I know I’m supposed to do something with this stuff, but I’m damned if I can remember what. I just can’t remember.
So I separated him from his new wife. There were antibiotics and vitamins in his water, and lter, a special high-nutrient supplement added to his food. Later I would decide that this supplement was to blame for his death, and that of his uncle as well. Both birds seemed to be on a slow but steady recovery path with the antibiotics and vitamins, but in retropsect I made the connection that each bird had started to go downhill after I introduced the supplement, which, by the way, they loved. I’d used this particular supplement in years past on any number of birds, and I didn’t recall it being a source of trouble. But it had been several years since I’d bought any, and perhaps the formula had been changed slightly, I don’t know. I only know that it seemed to weaken Zachary and Pepper even further, and speed up the end.
And when he was gone, so was the Juliet-Romi family, which began twenty years ago next month, and ended ten years ago today. And I miss them. No matter how much time goes by, I miss that clan of tiny chattering siblings and cousins and children and grandchildren, and every minute of wonder they gave me.
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(tree is a clipping)
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