Did You Check the Mail?

Shipping eggs from zoo-to-zoo can be a complicated, nerve-racking process if you aren't use to it.  Shipping eggs, as farmers typically do it, is fairly routine.  They just package them up and send them in the mail.  It turns out, you can send all sorts of weird things in the mail.  Including more exciting poultry.

Working at one facility, I was the proud caretaker of a big, beautiful, and extremely ornery blue-eared pheasant.  Okay, maybe "beautiful" was stretching it.  Truth be told, he looked and acted like one of the more deranged Muppets.  Still, I was very fond of him, not least of all because he savagely beat up and scarred - emotionally and physically - my thoroughly mean and unpleasant direct supervisor, to the point where she became too scared to go in with him, and other keepers followed her example.  As a result, I became Blue's (we were all real original with naming animals back then) sole caretaker.  When the time came to get a female for him, I think I was the only one who was excited.

On the day that she was supposed to arrive, I waited with eagerness.  Then I waited with boredom.  Then nervousness.  Then dread.  Where the heck was that bird?  We had ordered her from a breeder (there being few of the species in other zoos), so I was expecting a delivery van to pull up with her.  But nothing happened.  Until the end of the day, that is.

Our groundskeeper, who had been out in town doing errands, pulled up to the office in his truck.  He handed me a small cardboard box, not much bigger than a shoebox, that had been left by the mailbox.  It had airholes... and it was moving, slightly.

I thought that there was no way that this could be it.  It didn't look anywhere near the size of what I was expecting.  Still, it was a package with airholes, and the barely legible return address matched up.  I took it into our quarantine barn. I opened it up.

It wouldn't be accurate to say that the pheasant hen stepped out.  It would be closer to the truth to say that she unfolded, like a piece of origami.  Staring at her next to the package she came it, I wondered how on earth she fit in there.  I also wondered how long she'd been out there by the mailbox, waiting for someone to notice her.  I made a mental note not to get birds from this source again.

Still, the hen seemed none the worse the wear from her adventure, and after a few weeks in quarantine, was ready to meet Blue.