Air the parakeet was a handicapped but incredibly tame bird. She also wanted to be a mother, and that desire killed her.
Parakeets are born incredibly tiny and incompetent. After hatching, they lie on their backs, legs akimbo. Their mother feeds them and they grow. As the babies get bigger, they turn over and learn to stand, pulling their legs together in the proper standing position.
If the legs do not come together, the bird is called "splay-legged." What causes splay-leg is not known. It might be genetic, it might be a mistake in care by the mother bird, or it might even be an infection. If you have a baby with splay-leg, check with your vet — there may be new treatments even as I write this.
Three years ago, the treatment for splay leg was to make a splint out of duct tape and cardboard and gently bring the legs together under the bird. Often it works. This is what we did when we pulled Air from the nest box. Air hated the splint and behaved as if she were being tortured. We felt as if we were torturing her, but we also knew that if we didn't, she would die long before weaning.
Often, the splinting works well, and the bird appears normal. In Air's case, though, her body wound up twisted. Air had trouble breathing. The vet and we knew her life would be shorter than the 6-20 years one hopes for for a parakeet, but we decided to make it the best life possible.
Air turned out to be amazingly tame. She wanted us to pay attention to her. If she was on top of the cage as you walked by, she demanded attention. Somewhere along the line, we discovered that she liked to be turned upside-down and have her belly tickled. We started calling her our "Uside-Down Belly-Tickle Girl."
Air would fly around and loved to be with the other parakeets. As she got older and her cere (the portion over the beak with the nostrils in it) turned brown, we knew that she was female. We were concerned. Even at rest, breathing appeared to be an effort, and we worried what attempting to lay an egg would do to her. Until late in 2005, this wasn't a problem.
Air insisted on laying eggs last December. Much to our surprise, she was successful. We let her sit the eggs, and though she did a wonderful job, they didn't hatch. We're not sure if she had a mate. The eggs may never have been fertilized. By letting her sit the eggs, we hoped she'd get the need to lay eggs out of her system.
Last weekend, she tried again. The first couple eggs were fine. Yesterday morning, Air was acting normally, and I picked her up to give her a belly-tickle. She was glad for the attention, but wanted to go back to her nest. I could see that she was "dumpy butted" the way budgies are when they are gravid with an egg, but she wasn't acting as if she were egg bound. Nothing appeared wrong.
Several hours later, Air was dead. The time period was too short for egg-binding to be a problem. The egg was simply too large to allow her to breathe properly, and the stress killed her.
As humans, we romanticize motherhood. We tell ourselves tales of the mother's body nurturing the embryo to comfort ourselves. What's actually going on is closer to biochemical warfare. The embryo is an alien out to gain as much nourishment from the mother, no matter what cost to the mother. The embryo's attack on the mother is all-out, as the embryo does not understand that if it succeeds, both it and the mother will die.
Were that the complete story, I would not be typing this and you would not be reading this. The mother, it turns out, defends herself against the embryo. The mother's defense is not as vicious as the embryo's attack, so the embryo survives, but it doesn't get all the nourishment it demands, nor does it reach the size it strives for. This near-stalemate normally results in a baby being born. On occasion, the embryo kills the mother and itself or the mother the embryo.
Did Air lose the battle with the egg inside her? Do birds even have the same monstrous battle? Doctors have only learned recently about this battle in humans, so no research has been done on birds. Odds are, though, it's a similar struggle. In Air's case, her biochemistry fought the battle properly, but her biochemistry wasn't designed for her deformity. The egg became too big for her compromised air sacks and avian lungs to deal with, and Air's life ended.
Air, for all her friendliness and intelligence, did not understand the risks. She made no decision to have offspring, she simply acted by instinct. Air was not troubled by thoughts of her own death or of her children becoming ill and dying or being murdered by predators.
She did not understand these things, and now there is no bird waiting to be picked up and turned over on her back and have her belly tickled. The loss itself is painful and the echos resonate with things we can understand that she could not.