Abstract
What an apt name, in these strange times, for a Severe Macaw that survived the World 1rade Center disaster on September I Ith. Phoenix was hatched in May of 1999, in Tribeca, at Urban Bird (my original bird store), only four to five blocks from the World Trade Center. He is one of my incubator hatched, day-one handfed babies. Ile was adopted by my grandsons, and has lived with them and my daughter Jo Anne since then. Right in Tribeca.
When the Trade Center was struck by the first plane my daughter, JoAnne was no more than five blocks from the north tower, out for her first-ever morning jog, just crossing West Street, going in the direction of Stuyvesant High School.
She heard this huge crash, stopped, turned around, and like everyone else in the area, was stunned to see the entire top of Tower One engulfed in flames. Her first thought, which I've discovered was pretty universal, was "Oh my God, some small plane had an accident."
She watched in horror as the second plane stuck Tower Two, and ran home and called me. Tremblingly reporting that she was okay and that her first jog was her last, she grabbed Phoenix, put out enough food and water for her five cats, and literally ran to the kid's school, which is all the way across town in Chinatown.
By the time she got there Tower Two had fallen. Not knowing where to go, she took the two kids, my grandsons aged 13 and 12, and made tracks for the current Urban Bird, nearly a mile away from Chinatown, in Greenwich Village.
I was in Jersey City, just across the river, and in plain view of the towers. I may as well have been in Bora Bora. All public transportation was shut down, phone service was intermittent at best, and I felt as though I was in a sensory-deprived cocoon.
Communications were down for several hours after that, though the tv stations stayed pretty much on line, odd since the transmitters were located on the top of Tower One, the second one to collapse.
Everything seemed to be ... slow ... motion. It was instant tv coverage, but nobody seemed to know anything. The cameras were there, but it wasn't until a little later that the realization of the enormity of this fateful morning slowly dawned on us.
I was frantic. I had no idea what was happening, no way to contact my staff, didn't know who was caught in the subway, where JoAnne and the kids were, and what was really driving me crazy was that there were about a dozen unwearied baby parrots at the store which nobody was going to be able to handfeed.
Their last handfeeding had been at 10:00 P.M. Monday night. One of our handfeeders, Suzanne, was in the "danger zone" not more than a few blocks from the WTC, just a block to the East, and when I finally reached her she said that she couldn't get out of her building. (I learned later that her mom, Joyce, who works for the Port Authority, was at work on the 63rd floor of Tower One when the first plane struck-this was below the impact-and that she made it out safely)
The other handfeeder, Orlando, lives all the way uptown, and no subways were running. And, I was stuck in Jersey City, with no way to get in to feed the young birds.
The babies included a very young Scarlet Macaw, a slightly older Scarlet, a Military and a Blue and Gold, as well as two caiques, two Hahn's Macaws, several baby Amazons and pionus, plus two just-weaned mynah birds, who have special diets, of course.
From this perspective, seven weeks later, it all seems almost like ancient history, since most of us have really found ways to go about our lives, in a more or less normal way.
Believe me, there was nothing even remotely normal about that first day nor about the weeks that followed.