The Ballad of Little Popo

I call this series "Just Vignettes" because that's what they are, just short snapshots of things that have happened to me or have been told to me. I can vouch the stories you read here are mostly true.

On a warm Ford Island evening in Pearl Harbor, a maintenance man using a firehose cleaned the beams over the exterior passageways. Little Popo was carried by the force of the water from her nursery, falling to the teak deck below. Someone found her in a puddle and picked her up, naked and wet but still alive. She was brought to me. I would dry her off, bring her home, and feed her a warm porridge sold as food for baby parrots. I fed her porridge hourly from a syringe for the next few days. On days I had to work, I smuggled her into my office and surreptitiously kept her in a desk drawer to continue her hourly feedings.

Time passed. Little Popo metamorphosed from a creature that looked like a newborn mouse into an ungainly fledgling and finally into a beautiful, young Zebra Dove. She began to coo to me whenever she saw me. Our evenings were spent with her on my lap. She liked to lie on her back with her feet poking in the air while I stroked her belly, eyes closed. Should I hesitate or stop, an eye would crack open to check on me, revealing her eyes to be robin's egg blue. Her zebra stripes were black and light gray with cinnamon dissolving to a latte cream color on her breast. She was always sweet, always loving.

As these things happen, she grew to be too much for my office desk drawer and graduated to a parakeet cage hanging from my backyard hedge of bamboo and orchids. She lived there for nearly three years, coming inside to stand on my shoulder or sit on my lap in the evening. I fed her pelletized modern bird food, designed to feed canaries, which consisted of millet-sized balls of red, orange, yellow, and green. Little Popo would always eat the red ones first, then the orange ones, then yellow, and finally the green. I imagine she thought the green ones were not quite ripe. I never tasted them, but I'm sure they all tasted the same.

When I would clean her cage, Little Popo was placed on top, where she would wait while I removed the bottom, cleaned the cage, and then returned it to normal. Little Popo was free to go if she wanted, but she waited patiently atop the cage and seemed to be happy to return to the inside of her cage. 

One day when I went out to clean her cage, I saw a male Zebra Dove watching from the top of the fence. This day, when I removed Little Popo from her cage, she briefly stood on the cage roof and then took flight to join the male dove. Of course, I was sad about her leaving but happy that she wanted to return to her natural state in the wild. I thought I would never see her again.

Weeks passed. One evening, I returned home to see Little Popo standing on top of the fence under the starfruit tree, waiting for me. Next to her were four fledglings who had just learned to fly. I quickly retrieved her special food from inside the house. She was still waiting when I returned, so I sat on the pathway under the tree and spread some of her food on the concrete in front of me. Little Popo led her brood down to me and began to show them just how to eat this food, first red, then orange, then yellow, saving the green for last. I could see her husband on the roof's edge, peering over nervously. I believe Little Popo was just showing me that she was alright and had done good. I don't know if science says a small dove is capable of expressing gratitude, but I believe that's just what Little Popo did. I never saw her again.