Part of the delight of Paris is the constant surprise. Turn a corner and you never know what you’ll find. A motorcycle bearing down on you, a frail old lady inching across the street like a snail, a row of shops all gleaming like stars.

Yesterday, a Sunday, it was a market I found. I had ridden my bicycle through the small streets of Ile de St. Louis in the middle of the Seine, then across a bridge where a mime had drawn a crowd that clogged the bridge, then through the small streets of Ile de la Cite, where the cathedral Notre Dame is located.

Turning this particular corner, I found a row of small green sheds, populated by flower and plant merchants. It was a market, a commonplace phenomenon in Paris, but rare and precious in my estimation. Markets allow small vendors to set up shop for a few hours with little of the normal overhead. No heat certainly. No electric lights. Taxes? Not if you are paid in cash. Markets provide the almost unheard of experience of buying directly from someone who knows a great deal about what they sell, who is probably often even insanely in love with it and happy to share their knowledge.

At the end of the row of plant sellers, I turned the corner to come back the other side, expecting to see more plants. What I saw made me laugh out loud. Hundreds of bird cages and perhaps a thousand or more small birds. Though it was cool, they were singing and squawking and carrying on, chatting with themselves, perhaps commenting on the people who stood, like me, dumbfounded, simply staring at them.

Some of the stalls were neatly arranged, with well kept cages, housing each a bird. This reminded me of the more fashionable and expensive districts of Paris, where people kept more to themselves.

Other stalls were chaotic. Birds, cages, sellers – all in disarray, piled on top of each other.

Some were comic. In one stall, a man who looked Peruvian, had a very small white dog at his feet, a few cages of birds, rabbits, and guinea pigs on a table, and on top of a couple of cages stood a huge and colorful chicken, who looked like a lion figurehead. He stood fully upright, hardly moving and was clearly in control, eyeing everyone who passed. I flinched when I saw him, he so dominated the scene.

It was 6:00 and the market was being torn down, being packed into dirty white vans to be driven home somewhere. I had to wonder what it was like at home. The people who kept the stalls seemed so exotic that I’m sure some of them lived in small apartments that were crammed with birds and birdcages and dirty newspaper.

I watched as a man loaded a few birds into the back of his van and then took a large cage with rabbits and placed it on top. As he did this, a gray parrot let out a loud warning squawk to say “Hey, not here. Don’t you have any sense at all? Can you imagine what it’s like being under these filthy things?” The man, smoking a cigarette, took no notice, gave several cages a big push and went back for more.

Two cages I saw looked handmade. They were of wood and screen, looking like they could have started life as grapefruit crates. They were about three feet square and about 10 inches high, and housed at least 60 yellow canaries each. They looked like they had been packed about as tightly as they could be packed, looking much as a busy railroad station might, but they seemed completely undisturbed, hopping around, singing, and eating seed from the bottom of the cage. I wondered if this was their travel mode, and what it would be like to catch each of the birds and stuff them into this cage. Would they be willing?