As I passed by the bird store "33rd and Bird" after work yesterday, the window displays, which until recently had been occupied by small parakeet-type birds and a toucan, were filled with these pigeons. They were as motionless as I've ever seen pigeons, mostly just looking out at the street, apparently quite befuddled at their sudden captivity. Right away I imagined some kind of pygmalion plot in which they'd be fed nice food and turned into classy birds so they could be sold at high prices. But today they were gone.

33rd and Bird was previously located on 33rd Street in Manhattan, a couple of blocks away from 3rd Avenue. In April 2006 they relocated to Bruckner Blvd. in the South Bronx, which if it had a number instead of that name, would be 133rd Street.

33rd and Bird's website is an unfortunate creature itself. All of the pages display a plaintext "Shopping Basket," which might lead you to believe that you can buy things on the site. But none of the pages show any products with "add to cart" buttons. The closest they come are the pages about hand-fed baby birds and custom-built aviaries, which only hint demurely at the possibility of purchase. Some of the photos on the site appear to have old-fashioned date stamps on the pictures themselves.

Aha, there's a Product Search link at the top of the page. You can search by keyword or by SKU. When I search for "bird", I get a list of all the section pages that are already listed down the left-hand side of every page. Oh well.

Easily the funniest part of all this is that the URL's of the pages on the site look to me like creations of Ruby on Rails. What sort of database could be behind this site I cannot fathom. Also, several times while viewing the site pages randomly failed to load, then showed up fine when I hit 'reload.' It's a shame, because it's a really cool store and a fun place to walk by every day.