Tokens of Love

(The following story contains graphic examples of dirty gene pools. BEWARE.)

My husband bought me zebra finches. A male and a female. Eight months later they had turned into sixteen zebra finches. Two females and fourteen males. The second female was the result of one of the first male offspring of Cosmo (the male) and Wanda (the female), breeding with his mother. She was born with funky feet. Think the dance the Peanuts Gang do, but with their feet forever turned in towards each other. Being the politically correct person that I am, I named her Retard Girl. I guess that her father was also her brother.

Cosmo, her father, mated with her, and they produced a few other males. So this male's father was also his grandfather. One of these males mated with his mother, who was the daughter of his father's father and also grandfather. They had another male. This male had a gimpy wing. It just sort of hangs at his side. He is very adept at climbing though. A monkey has nothing on this zebra finch. Using his beak and his feet he climbs the bars of a very large cage (its about as tall as a 3rd grader - necessary with such huge quantities of love in the air), you can only tell that he's not exactly prime finch material by the loud metallic "CLANG" that is heard when he decides he's hungry and has to "fly" down to the food dish at the bottom of the cage. Its more like a plummet. I figure its just as well that he never really tries to use his functional wing. He'd spend forever flying in circles. Using all the powers of imagination at my disposal, I named him "Hurt Wing."

Hurt Wing and Retard Girl hooked up in that "special" way. It was a case of a male breeding with his sister who was also his mother. His father was the father of his sister/mother, and also his own grandfather. They had a baby. This baby had a crooked top beak, only half there. Looking for a positive I noted how cute his tongue was as it visiably flickered in and out of his mouth. When it was time to fledge, he hopped out of the nest like all the rest had, unfortunately he had no balance. He was a finch weeble. He would try to get upright, only to fall to the other side. His daddy, Hurt Wing, would sort of shove him against the side of the bottom of the cage in order to regurgetate seed into his mouth when he shouted "HEY I AM HUNGRY". Of course there would first be the "CLANG" of Hurt Wing hitting the bottom of the cage, as he plummetted down from on high to respond to his son's/nephew's cries. Retard Girl was busy sitting on new eggs and didn't dare leave her latest batch of genetic excellence to care for Weeble. Yes, his name was Weeble.

I've never seen such a will to thrive as Weeble displayed. He couldn't fly, he couldn't even sit up right, but he was gonna go places. He spent his days rolling from one side of the cage to the other. His father Hurt Wing would plummet to feed him, shoving him up against the side of the cage, and then it'd be back to going places for Weeble. The other birds didn't much care for him and somehow he lost an eye. He tried to roll so his one good eye was up.Balor said he'd "take care" of him for me. But I had hope. Maybe he'd grow out of his neurological deficiences. Maybe his beak would grow and straighten. He had heart. He didn't know he wasn't acting like a bird. He'd never been anything other than what he was. Never done anything more than what he'd done. He probably figured all the birds above him weren't as talented as he was, they didn't know how to roll. He wasn't suffering. His father never left him to starve. I held him to give him physical touch. Bird's preen each other, so I figured he needed some warmth.

Well, last week he died. I went to give him some touch and he was just laying on the bottom of the cage, not rolling. He had a few months of life. I had an opportunity to gain some good advice.

1. Don't mate with your sister/aunt/mother/ when your father is your own uncle/grandfather.

2. Never give up, never surrender.

3. Always try to land with your good eye up.