He stands on the chair beside me, nuzzling my writing arm. He is so glad to be released from his overnight stay in the kitchen. In spite of his soft bed, fresh water and food, his litter box in the petit coin, he’d much rather sleep on our faces. But we need sleep, too.
He sounds like a little fire. I put down my pen, pick up the pink brush, and comb his white and gold fur. He lifts his face so I can get at the thick Elizabethan ruff beneath his chin. Marley, Marley.
When he’s happy, the fur puffs up around his face, and he reminds me of a bumblebee, drunk on pollen.
It’s too cold now in Paris to leave the windows open. And anyway, Marley’s not as interested in prowling on the ledge since the Tourterelles were evicted.
One morning, shortly after the first egg was hatched, we opened the curtains to see if their second egg had hatched. The older chick had been gobbling food for days.
The nest was gone. Gone. Our neighbors’ grimy window had been “cleaned,” that is, someone had opened it and rubbed a rag in careless circles, leaving swirls of dirt on the glass.
What had they done with the nest? Swept it out of the geranium box? Madame and Monsieur Tourterelle might have flown away, but the three-day-old chick could not have survived, and the egg would surely have smashed.
This was the first and only video we had of that chick.
We wanted to go down to their apartment and bang on the door. But the building is one adjacent to us, and we don’t have the entry code.
What kind of people, we wondered, cannot wait two weeks for two baby doves to gain the strength to fly, before sweeping aside a nest?
Had they seen Richard’s camera pointed at their window, and felt paranoid? No, he’d made sure there were no humans around when he photographed the doves.
So hard-hearted; they were hard-hearted. Can anyone be callous towards animals and birds, and tender towards humans?
What do you think?
To celebrate the life of the Tourterelles, and to kick off a second Surrealist Café event, in which you readers participate in Paris Play, we ask the following:
On Saturday, October 29th, at 1 p.m. in your time zone, go to your favorite café, and write or photograph or draw or compose a tune about an animal, or fish, or bird you see that day, or one who is dear to you, or an imaginary beast, or your totem animal. Write or photograph or paint from a human perspective, or from the animal’s point of view. Don’t be intimidated if you’re not an artist. Last Surrealist Café, every contribution was imaginative.
Send it to us by e-mail the following Wednesday, November 2 (absolute drop-dead deadline), and we’ll post the best work on Paris Play Saturday, November 5th.
Marley just leapt back on the chair, nudged my arm, and started purring like a bonfire, like a champion Swiss yodeler.
Monsieur Tourterelle: Yes, you told me. I believe you.
Madame Tourterelle: But you weren’t there. You can’t imagine how sad it was. As if you were watching one of our children—but fifty times as heavy, with no wings—try to fly from the nest a few days after he was hatched.
Monsieur Tourterelle: That I can’t imagine. We guard them and feed them day and night until they’re strong enough to fly on their own.
Madame Tourterelle: Humans really don’t have wings.
Monsieur Tourterelle: That’s obvious.
Madame Tourterelle: But this is the first time I felt it viscerally.
Monsieur Tourterelle: Was he fully fledged?
Madame T: Oh yes. You knew him. The one who put out morsels for us on his windowsill.
Monsieur T.: He never had any others of his kind visiting him.
Madame T.: This is what I don’t understand. In Asia, humans are rarely alone. Or that’s what my great-great grandmother told me.
Monsieur T.: I heard the same thing from my great-grandfather, who lived in Key West. He said humans knocked on the doors of new neighbors, and welcomed them, invited them over.
Madame T.: The woman who lived below him was a world traveler, a wise, warm-hearted soul. I heard her say the other day—
Monsieur T.: —Oh dovey, don’t tell me you’re learning human speech now!?
Madame T.: What else do I have to do all night, sitting on those eggs? She leaves her windows open. Friends visit. I heard her telling one of them about the fall. She said she’d wanted to welcome him to the building when he moved in. But you don’t do that in France. She’d heard from his landlord that he was French, but not from Paris, an engineer in his 30s, shy. That was all she knew.
Monsieur T.: Did she see him fall?
Madame T.: Are you asking me a sensationalistic question?
Monsieur T.: Non, ma chère, I’m just wondering if he got confused and thought he could fly.
Madame T.: He jumped! The woman was so shaken, thinking if only this custom of reserve between neighbors wasn’t so strong here, she would have welcomed him, been a friend.
Monsieur T.: Because he was lonely.
Madame T.: Of course he was. It’s easy for us tourterelles. We pair up, have two kids every few months, help each other feed and raise them, and stay together for life.
Monsieur T.: Life seems to be more complicated for humans.
Madame T.: Coo COO coo. That’s the truth. Did you find us another home?
Monsieur T.: I did. It’s in the fifth arrondissement, quite beautiful, among some pink geraniums.
Madame T.: You’re wonderful. Is it safe?
Monsieur T.: These particular humans never open their windows.
Madame T.: Is it soft?
Monsieur T.: A bit too twiggy for my taste.
Madame T.: I’ll fluff it up with some feathers.
Monsieur T: There IS one thing… A human on the next floor up seems like a spy or something. He has this thing set up that looks like a miniature Eiffel Tower holding a big round eye that’s watching the nest. Sometimes two of them take turns looking through that eye.
Madame T.: They’re probably studying us for hints on how to live. How to be calm, productive and peaceful. Content with whatever life brings your way.
Monsieur T.: As long as it’s not a hawk.
Madame T.: Oui, mon amour, anything but that. Shall we help them out?
The apartment across the courtyard--the twig-lined fixer-upper in the windowbox--is occupied once again, as of yesterday. An industrious young couple has moved in, and looks to be setting up housekeeping among the geraniums.
Paris Play readers will recall that the apartment's builders and first occupants, another pair of Eurasian Collared Doves, successfully fledged two young, and the whole family departed just last month. That saga began here, continued here, and ended here. Those posts included a lot of background on this bird species, which you can read there, so we won't be redundant.
The new couple did some serious renovating, including passing straw beak-to-beak in very close quarters:
The new couple is definitely not the old couple (you'll recall mom had a scissor beak), but we will entertain speculation that it might be the kids (let's say they were brother and sister) come back to raise a new generation. We know enough about Pharaonic royalty, if not about birds, to entertain that notion. Or maybe it's just one of the old kids, with a mate, met on the romantic summer streets of Paris.
And here's a Paris Play first: VIDEO of one half of the new couple doing some serious circle-dance renovating. The Paris Play Nikons have HD video capture technology, which we've been saving for the right occasion, so here's our one-minute video debut:
The baby doves we've been watching in our neighbors' window box successfully fledged, and are gone from the nest, along with their parents, although we spotted the scissor-billed mom yesterday wandering around on the zinc roof a couple of floors above the nest, as if she was visiting an old homestead from a discreet distance.
This was one of their many feedings on August 1st. Note that both have full juvenile plumage (putting a wing around mom just to try it out), and are slowly losing all of their golden down.
And this is the last picture we have, on August 3rd, just before they took off to be adult Parisians. We had asked them when they were born what we should name them, and they replied that they didn't want to be named, because having names would only increase the grief when they left.
03.18.2012 
