Frank took the pigeon out of its intake pet carrier. The bird seemed unresistant, but it watched her closely with one eye and then the other, something pigeons do to improve their depth perception. “This one is what we call B.A.R.,” Frank said. “That means it’s bright, alert, and responsive. Impaired birds are Q.A.R.—quiet, alert, and responsive. Except for the feet, it’s in good shape. The ones Lori brings in are usually B.A.R., because they don’t have to be impaired for her to catch them.” After testing the bird’s flapping ability by holding it at its midsection and raising it up (flapping normal), and listening to its heartbeat (also normal) with a stethoscope, she gave it an injection of sterile fluid to keep it hydrated, and then an intramuscular injection of pain medication. She put a clear conical mask over its head and bill and began a flow of oxygen, combined with isoflurane gas to knock it out. Then she carefully laid it on a spread-out towel, with its head on a rolled-up towel for a pillow. The de-stringing was likely to hurt, and she thought the bird would be safer if it was unconscious. In a few seconds, its eyes had glazed over.
The pigeon lay with its feet spread, like a K.O.’d boxer. Frank started on the left foot, using scissors, tweezers, and other sanitized instruments she took from plastic packages. The work requires a watchmaker’s focus. She cut through brown packing twine and dark pieces of thread and unwound them with the tweezers. The right foot was even worse than the left—a fright-wig mass of string, feathers, human hair, and some pale, waxy, tightly wrapped stuff that turned out to be dental floss. She unpicked the layers carefully, one at a time. When both feet were done, she put an antibiotic cream on the lesions with a Q-tip, and bandaged them with thin pieces of gauze and strips of vet wrap to hold it.
That “The pigeon lay with its feet spread, like a K.O.’d boxer” made me smile. Frazier is a superb describer. On a visit with pigeon-keeper Pat McCarthy, he writes, “One afternoon, he led me up a steel ladder from the building’s fire escape and over a patch of ice to the coop, where the birds were kind of burbling, like gently percolating coffee.” My favorite passage in “Pigeon Toes” is Frazier’s description of a woman feeding pigeons near the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
She has a folding table; an ironing board; a cart with handles at both ends that contains a dozen or more orange-and-green Fresh Direct shopping bags; a broom; some pet-size water bowls; a pair of hockey sticks; and various bread knives. She has told me that she comes from Poland and now lives in her car, which is parked nearby. Her conversation can devolve into a kind of radio-static recitation of terrible things that happened in Poland in the previous century. On the ironing board, which is set at a convenient height, she cuts up old loaves that she gets for free from a nearby bakery, and then she tosses the bread cubes onto the granite paving blocks of the plaza. Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn. Sometimes she looks over her shoulder for hawks and falcons. Once, when the pigeons all left simultaneously before the food was consumed, she said a hawk had come. I looked up in the trees but couldn’t see it. On occasion, she points out a limping bird, whose leg she says was broken by a hawk.
“Pigeon Toes” is a vivid, gentle piece that explores the world of street pigeons and the hazards they have to brave. I enjoyed it immensely.
Postscript: And let’s give a huzzah for Rachel Syme’s delightful “Local Gems: Fountain Pen Hospital,” in this week’s “Goings On” (“The store’s longtime head salesman is a fountain-pen savant. I recently went hunting for a wet-writing flexible nib and, within a few moments, he produced from the back room a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the nineteen-twenties. ‘This, this, is the pen for you,' he said. He was right”).
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