Oedipus, King of the Falcons: Dissonant Fragments of a Work in Progress

Part 1

Five weeks ago today, Oedipus decided it was time for him to cut his way out of the egg. He pushed his feet against the side of the shell and pushed his head back fiercely, forcing the small hard notch on his beak to break through the shell above his head. A couple of small bits of shell fell onto his head as he pushed his head back a second time and etched another millimeter of shell. After a short pause, he pressed his feet again firmly against the shell, and swung his head back. Crunch. Another two millimeters of shell split apart. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

After ten minutes, about one fifth of the circumference of the shell had been broken in a jagged line about his head. After a pause to rest for a further ten minutes, Oedipus started chopping again. Within half an hour, three quarters of the shell had been cut apart. Rocking from side to side, pressing his feet up against the wall of the shell, flinging his head further and further back, Oedipus was preparing his entry into the world beyond his shell. In ten more minutes, one more strong heave and the two sides of the shell fell apart. Panting a little from exertion, Oedipus stretched his legs and pushed himself free, leaving behind him the portable womb so kindly given to him by his mother.

Inside the shell he left the membrane that had surrounded him while he had been growing, still containing just a little of the blood in the veins that had kept it alive. Until this moment it had been part of his body. Just before the final act of splitting the shell in half he had drawn most of the blood inside his body through a fragile umbilical cord. This now breaks as he crawls away from the egg's broken shell and nestles in a corner against a sterilized, cotton hippopotamus, lent to him by my daughter Robin.

He is still wet so he rubs against the surrogate mother to dry himself, and in so doing ruffles up the smallest of small feathers that thinly cover him. But they soon fluff out and become white, so that after half an hour he resembles a ball of cotton wool, with a pair of claws at one end and a pointed beak at the other.

I kill a quail and open it up, next to the electric brooder/incubator where Oedipus is being kept warm. I take off the top of the brooder and gently lift out Oedipus and place him in a small bowl lined with cotton wool. I bend over him and click my tongue a few times in imitation of an adult falcon. Oedipus, less than an hour old, balances himself upright between his two legs stretched out on each side of his body, sticks his head in the air, opens his huge mouth and chups back at me; so I place a hot, bloody morsel of quail heart into his mouth, and he promptly gobbles it down with obvious excitement. His eyes are open, gazing up at me, two translucent black suns that are bringing to this magical moment, one hundred million years of falcon consciousness.

I feed him more small bloody morsels of meat, from muscles, the breast and some more from the heart. When I see that his small crop is almost full of food, I stop feeding him and place him back into the brooder, where he snuggles up to the hippopotamus and falls immediately to sleep.

For the first five days he is fed every two hours or so, or whenever he calls to me for food. As he gets bigger, so his crop enlarges until after two weeks he can be fed every four hours, five times a day, with eight hours undisturbed at night when both of us can enjoy some sleep.

When he hatched he weighed thirty grams.

So when was Oedipus born? Was he born when he hacked his way out of his egg? But two days before that...