Geriatric Sex

When Zoe was little she had a pair of gerbils, both boys. Unfortunately one of them died. We waited about a week postmortem before heading to the pet store in an effort to prevent Gerbil #1 (Jake) from leading a lonely and unfulfilled existence. There would have been times in my life that I’d have been mortified to scrutinize rodent genitals in public but having had a child of my own I had evolved beyond such silly insecurities. So there I stood, at the pet store, in full view of the entire town, giving that little bugger a good thorough once over. And while Larry may never believe me, I was certain that Rose possessed all the necessary boy parts to prevent any unwanted hanky panky. Mysteriously though some malevolent force must have intervened between the time I left that store and the time I got home because unlike Rose #1 (much to Jake’s delight) Rose #2 was a girl. To make a long story short we ended up with 13 lovely gerbils sorted by gender into 4 tanks where they lived happily to ripe old age(s).

I know that seems like a rather long introduction to nowhere but what I’m trying to get at is that I’ve done it again. We have two parakeets that flutter and serenade us above our living room. Parakeets generally live between 2 and 7 years so a couple of years ago when Sunny died at the age of 4 1/2 we weren’t too surprised. Luke (parakeet #1) had hated Sunny (parakeet #2) with a vengeance. Nonetheless in my vivid imagination I couldn’t stand the idea of her living out her remaining days alone and pining for companionship. So we (I) brought home Savannah only later to realize that “he” was male. That was about 2 years ago but since we figured Luke was about 150 in bird years we weren’t too concerned with Savannah's persistent and devoted wooing of her. Now at the geriatric age of 6 or 7? someone needs to tell Luke that she’s supposed to be on her way to the grave, not starting a family. In fact about three weeks ago when she first went missing Larry and I looked everywhere for her little corpse but couldn’t for the life of us find it. What we did find was that the hole in their perching log was suspiciously full of stuff. Not long after that Luke came flitting out of that log alive and well. She’s been in and out every since and this morning there are clearly little voices chirruping from inside of it. If the internet is right we may have as many as 5-10 (gasping and swallowing hard here) new souls in our midst, but it will probably be another month before we see them. I’m not sure what we’re going to do once we get a final count but I’m sure it’ll all work out.

Today was the first time we’ve ever had a reason to read the breeding section in Zoe’s parakeet book but according to page 28 the male must be kept near the female after breeding because her eggs will only mature if she can hear him singing. How romantic is that???