Editor’s note: Jeanine Farley is on vacation; this is a guest column.
A new resident moved into our building at TenTen Memorial Drive recently, and one day last month we noticed a bird unlike anything we had ever seen before in our small courtyard with the new neighbor hovering solicitously above it.
As regular readers of “Wild Things,” we decided to investigate further.
The creature is apparently quite domesticated, since it made no attempt to fly away from the neighbor. She even let her owner pick her up — is it a ‘her’? — and cuddle her. Or it.
Given that the neighbor brought it outside, we figured it must require area to roam, like a free-range chicken. We speculate it will not survive if trapped in a small cage (unlike free-range chickens).
But the bird, if it was indeed a bird, did not appear to have wings nor did it roam. Was it injured, perhaps? We had no answers to quell our confusion, and then, in an astonishing bit of luck, later that day we ran into the new neighbor in the hallway.
We learned she is Dr. Jeanne Rigolote, here on a fellowship from her native Dominica in the Caribbean, and that her strange animal is a bird (she keeps it in her apartment) of the species Oiseaux amoureuse. It does not appear in the iPhone app, Merlin, that we use routinely. This explains why we were flummoxed. Like the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker (we think it does exist!), this bird has no contemporary photographs or song recordings, but there are entries that appear to be members of the amoureuse species in eBird, the global online database where citizen scientists record sightings.
With enough to go on, we continued digging into this new (to us, anyway) creature. We stumbled across a study of the kiwi (bird) of New Zealand, also flightless. Like kiwis, this specimen has a rotund body, estimated to be the size of a small domesticated chicken. Also, like a kiwi, the wings are so rudimentary that they are, in effect, invisible.
Dr. Rigolote, who is a native French speaker, has no memory of seeing her pet in the wild when she lived in Dominica, but said she knows the creature as Gimmeakiss. That immediately had us thinking of the Mountain Chicken, which is not at all a chicken but in fact a very large frog (Leptodactylus fallax), with a body as large as a spring roaster. “Oh, crapaud!” Rigolote exclaimed when we shared our thoughts. Just when we thought we had offended her to get that response, she said, “Non, it’s not a toad.”
We kept up our quizzing. It turns out Dr. Rigolote can imitate its mating song, which vacillates between a sucking sound and a smack. In Dominica’s native French-laced Creole, ‘gimmeakiss’ is the translation of donnez-moi-un-bisous. Aha! Now that does sounds more like a bird’s call, like the barred owl’s “who cooks for you?,” especially when Dr. Rigolote does her imitation. Both the English and French Creole names make sense given the unusual anatomical feature of this rare avian, a beak that has been modified into a highly-pigmented lip-like structure suitable for scavenging small items on the ground.
Having bugged Dr. Rigolote enough, we turned to our other neighbors. We have discovered many of them have also seen and been puzzled by the gimmeakiss.
One of them, Catherine, a nine-year-old who recently completed reading “Animal Farm” in English and German, captured a portraiture of our mystery creature during a visit with Dr. Rigolote. (See drawing below.) She also wondered if the bird was injured because it didn’t move the whole time she was drawing it.
Catherine sparked an incident when she was showing her drawing at the bus stop. Another child of the building was there with his father, who turned out to be the ichthyologist Professor Quatschkopf. Professor Quatschkopf is an active member of the German GfuI (Gesellschaft für unmögliche Ichthyologie*) and disagreed wholeheartedly about the avian conclusion. “This specimen is obviously a dehydrated fish,” he wrote later in an email that was sent to every resident in the entire building. “It is likely related to the smooth puffer fish of New England (Lagocephalus laevigatus). It is likely this specimen was near the banks of the Charles River, found itself out of the water and dehydrated while, one might say, ‘in mid puff,’ and in doing so, reduced its fins — NOT WINGS — to mere rudiments.”
It didn’t end there. In response, Dr. Rigolote pushed “reply-all” and simply wrote: “You Old Fart. I mean, Fool. It’s the Poisson d’avril.”
A stronger
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