I think she remembered what had happened the last time I'd pointed a camera at her, so even though she'd spent a bit of a lonely morning without a single one of her own kind dropping in for a visit (unlike the two days before that when she'd had quite a lot of company) she opted for sidling away until there was nowhere left to particularly sidle too.



What may have played a part in that, though, was when I'd taken that photo, I'd sort of blocked access to her ramp so a repeat tumble by me would have left her no option other than to fling herself earthwards. Going round the other side of her, to take the next picture, thereby leaving her an escape route, meant I was allowed much closer :)



Which is the point at which she then waddled purposefully towards me - showing her burgeoning girth really quite... largely...



Due to falling asleep on the journey home on Tuesday (and having to retrace myself back to where I should have got) it was already well past the time she's been putting herself to bed. I didn't want to disturb her but as I got my keys out to open the front door, she craned her head round the opening of the hutch, and was so sweet, I thought I'd risk taking a picture of her, even though I knew it would need a flash and I wasn't sure how she'd react to it.



And she didn't seem to mind at all :)

............

Which is the point at which she then waddled purposefully towards me - showing her burgeoning girth really quite... largely...

.....

It is lovely to create a connection to a creature.

I got my loft bees (they are sleeping now), a kitchen slug, a ginger cat, a shy hedgehog and the ants that came into into my kitchen to gobble the piece of fruit I dropped on the floor (that was until they turned into flying ants)..

I like my white bummed (frilly panted) bees best.

They say pigeons are rats of the air. I don't think it's true.

Yours looks rather plump.. Good job I am a veggie :)

Joking.

It is good to connect to our animal brothers and sisters.

xx

It is lovely to create a connection to a creature.

I got my loft bees (they are sleeping now), a kitchen slug, a ginger cat, a shy hedgehog and the ants that came into into my kitchen to gobble the piece of fruit I dropped on the floor (that was until they turned into flying ants)..

I like my white bummed (frilly panted) bees best.

They are soooooo cute, aren't they! :)

They say pigeons are rats of the air. I don't think it's true.

I've never thought that either. I mean - where do all those half-eaten burgers and chips, and discarded bits of deep-fried chicken and whatnot that they do their best to vacuum up for us, come from after all...? Us lot and our filthy, lazy rubbish-strewing ways is where. I also feel similarly about those rats without wings, you know, the ones that are just... well... rats :)

But you mentioning that has reminded me of something I came across the other day. Hold on, I'll see if I can find it again....

Pigeons are more like living helicopters than flying rats I got a bit of a chill when drones were brought up though. I mean... what kind of drones are they talking about I wonder.

Yours looks rather plump.

:) she does, and you've just reminded me of something else now :) (This is really a lot of remembering... in a very short space of time. It might even, flatten my brain... hopefully not before the end of this post though)



Speckled Jim was plump too... (Crunchy probably knows what I'm on about here - but not everybody will) I tried to find a pertinent clip but couldn't - so this links to the entire episode (Corporal Punishment - episode 2 of Black Adder Goes Forth) with the pertinent bit being near the beginning.

And while I'm on about carrier pigeons - I also came across this the other day: Famous pigeons which left me feeling really quite amazed and humbled too.

Good job I am a veggie :)

Joking.

:)) Good job I am too, because she really is... plump ;)

It is good to connect to our animal brothers and sisters.

xx

Awwwww. it is, and a big thank you hug and some of these ---> xx too.

I'm a bit perplexed by a few of todays goings on, however. I'll try post again about that before morning, but it might have to be a bit later than that if not.

She is lucky to have found you, Annie. :-) She is pretty for a bird. Best of luck to you both. :)

---

My stepmom's first husband was from Thailand and definitely was not a veggie. He looked at pigeons as a cat would. Targets of opportunity. He called them "Thai Chicken."

---

World famous film director Ingemar Bergman did a homage to pigeons called De Düva:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1TlAd6M-xU

Awww :) thanks, Lynn.

That video was erm... darkly entertaining, moomin :) I'd probably never have known it existed without you, so thank you :)

Admiral... *mournful blink* if I may chat to you in a minute...? First - I'm going to talk about that perplexed thing I mentioned last night. It comprises several parts, one of which was, I'd had to accompany my other half to a hospital appointment yesterday morning because the transport team didn't turn up, and when I got home, it was to find the postman hadn't closed the gate behind him but had left it gaping wide open. Everything seemed okay in the garden, other than she was a lot more nervous of being approached, which I thought was possibly understandable. Then, instead of putting herself to bed in the hutch like she's been doing, she elected to huddle on the doorstep again. At first I thought she just fancied a late night, but she was still there at about 1am and absolutely refused to go near the hutch when I tried to usher her into it, but chose to rather sit under the trampoline blinking at me in the light of the torch instead. I got this weird feeling she was trying to tell me something and I was really tempted to allow her into the hallway for the night and simply shut her in there so our cats couldn't feast on her - but the earful I would have got from my other half if he'd have found out, put me off. So I told myself to stop being stupid and to just go to bed. And all was fine anyway, first thing, when I checked on her this morning and put some food out. So I stopped thinking about it.

So that was perplexed #1. Perplexed #2 was another pigeon, which, for the last couple of days, has taken to hanging out in the garden too. Going by what I've glimpsed of its toes, I'm almost certain it's male. Going by everything else I've seen of his ... erm ... behaviour, I'm absolutely certain he's brain damaged though. Poor love.

I first noticed something odd about him by the way he eats - which basically involves picking up a morsel in his beak and then... instead of tipping his head up a little to get it to drop into his mouth, flings his head far too enthusiastically backwards whilst 9 times out of ten, forgetting to hold onto the morsel and instead - hurling it several feet behind himself then turning around to find it, but immediately falling over his feet. He's also extremely nervous and at the slightest disturbance, takes to the wing but about 7 times out of ten - crashes straight into a wall, a hedge - whatever happens to be there really... which is not exactly the kind of role model our big little girl needs - and can't be doing his head and neck much good either :(

And here he is. I took that through the window whilst he was drying out after the heavy spell of rain yesterday, so was able to take my time working out zooming in on him. Another thing I noticed, was that he seems to have a sort of Parkinson's thing going on with his head - which is rarely still - but he doesn't look miserable and doesn't behave like he's unwell in any other respects. I've been keeping my movements slow when he's around to avoid startling him into hurting himself on take off and he's now more or less okay with me being about -but only just - and I need to keep my distance for that. So whether it would be kinder to have him put to sleep (assuming I could even catch him) I don't know :( Perplexed #3 is that whilst the average age at which pigeons in captivity begin breeding is about 7 months, the age for ferals is believed to be possibly quite a bit younger and now I know what I do about pigeons being monogamous, and how important dads are to learning to fly well... eeeeeeeeeeeeeeek, people.

And perplexed #4 is that he really does the loudest and most prolonged amount of "helicoptering" once he's in the air, and when he lands on window ledges it's in a manner which suggests he uses the window and his breastbone as a brake, and then slides down the glass until he's at rest. And I think it's the rowdiness of perplexed #4 which might be why something happened in the garden this morning :(( It's been... noticed...

I'd heard him arrive, from wherever he'd spent the night, with the crash I've become accustomed to hearing, and then everything returned to being reasonably peaceful again and I even thought I might try and catch another hour of sleep on the couch downstairs after seeing my other half into the care of the ambulance bus medics that take him to dialysis. But I couldn't get to sleep so decided after about fifteen minutes to just get up and be done with it. On my way to the kitchen, I heard mr-needs-a-crash-helmet take off so decided to lift back the edge of the curtain to peek out onto the trampoline and see how things were out there, just as he landed on it. I assumed it was me moving the curtain, why he then immediately took off again, and our little girl (who'd pottered towards where he'd last been) turned round to look up to where he'd then gone (the bedroom window-ledge upstairs) and barely a split second later, this massive white tomcat I've never seen before, leapt up behind her and pulled her to the ground out of my view :(((

He looked at pigeons as a cat would. Targets of opportunity.

Yes. I saw it all over his big beautiful furry face.

It only takes two big leaps to get from that window to my front door, which is where she'd somehow managed to get to herself, poor little love, with the cat (who perhaps had been surprised by the gift of a different pigeon to the one he'd originally been after) clearly having been partially given the slip, but in hot pursuit with one wing semi-secured in his teeth and in the process of transferring them to her big soft tummy as I hurled open the door and scared him into abandoning his quarry at my feet and legging-it.

By then - trapped as she was between two beasts trying to outdo each other for scariness, she dragged herself off into perhaps the most inaccessible spot in the whole of the garden for a human to get to, whilst I went after the cat to see where he was leaving from so I could (once I had a spare hour) make sure he wouldn't be coming back in that way again. By which time my son had heard all the commotion and was able to give a helping two-hands to mine in clearing a way to reaching her.

But as the last time I'd seen her, she'd been all disarrayed with wings dragging and in shock, I was expecting the worst - and in tears... but here she is soon after being extricated...



And after lengthy examination (where she was really good about being carefully prodded top to tail, upside down and right way up, and wing tip to wingtip) for wounds and whatnot, then gently wiped with cotton wool balls dipped in warm water to get all the gunk off her...



she'd perked up considerably :) I still can't quite believe she's really alright - because from what I saw it didn't look possible she could be - so I'll be checking her over again in awhile. At the moment, she's resting quietly in the now CLOSED hutch, which I've covered over to simulate night time for her. and I can't help thinking that perhaps yesterday, the cat had taken advantage of the open gate, and that our little girl had reached shelter in there but with the hutch door open, had perhaps been slightly terrorised in there so hadn't wanted to get in it last night.

I don't know - but anyway... so far so good, but I need to have a long think about what to do now.

They look more like rock pigeons to me.

Look at this baby feral pic from the internet.



See those yellow tufty bits. She still had a couple of those when she turned up on the doorstep. If you look at the link I posted early on this thread showing dad feeding his baby - you'll see that baby looks nothing like those cuties in your picture, and they are beautiful :)

edit: this is the link I meant. http://www.wysinfo.com/Pigeons/Life_of_baby_pigeon.htm Scroll to the first link for June 8th. That baby is three weeks old. Even two days earlier it looked quite a bit younger.

I'm under no illusions that this is an inner London feral - not one of your greater London pretties ;) but thank you for thinking of letting me know your concerns. It really is appreciated :)

Firstly - my apologies to Admiral for responding earlier in a manner that suggested his stepmom's first husband had a big beautiful furry face. Of course, he may well have done, but that is pure unsubstantiated supposition on my part from which I now shall distance myself from... ;)

Secondly - I just came across this: squab news from two days ago.

Two baby pigeons were flown home to the UK from the mid-Atlantic after they stowed away on the Royal Navy’s brand new £3 billion aircraft carrier. The two 10 day old squabs were found by sailors on the HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of two brand new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers joining Britain’s fleets.

I'll be sure to remind the RSPCA of it should I need their assistance ;)

And I've tracked down the initial you tube video that made me first think I was looking at a quite young pigeon rather than an injured/sick adult from egg to pigeon

And whilst I was still entertaining a few doubts on its age - I'd also entered some sort of search engine enquiry that unearthed this: Why do you never see baby pigeons? I know we have a setizen-or-few who loathe the Guardian so I'd best warn them now that that is where I found it. It was of absolutely no use to me whatsoever, but some of the reasons given were really quite amusing :)

And now - I shall stop banging on about pigeons and go bore everyone somewhere else ;)

That's okay. He not around to get offended by anything anymore. He's long been looking at the bottom of the grass. I'm not hurt either about your comments. So don't worry about it. I did it more as a small nudge at Crunchy. I didn't mean any mental anguish if any for it.

---

Secondly - I just came across this: squab news from two days ago.

Two baby pigeons were flown home to the UK from the mid-Atlantic after they stowed away on the Royal Navy’s brand new £3 billion aircraft carrier. The two 10 day old squabs were found by sailors on the HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of two brand new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers joining Britain’s fleets.

Perhaps pigeons that will receive the Dickin Medal (the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross) like Commando:)

@Chris

They are indeed Rock Pigeons.

I more thought they looked like rock pigeons, than was sure, to be honest, and nor was I sure those were the young either - I just didn't say that because you seemed certain they were. Birds of different species do hang out together. Interbreeding between pigeon varieties and ferals (pretty much the mongrels of the pigeon family) can make it very difficult to be certain of what the lineage is to be honest. But if I had decided to be awkward and say you were looking at two separate families there... then I would also have said those pale creamy pink ones were not rock pigeons - and now I have decided to be awkward ;) I'm going with them being collared doves. Dad will be the one with the black stripe on the back of his neck. Although the other two look like they also have a collar, I actually think it's a shadow formed by slightly ruffled feathers at the back of the heads. Of course I could be wrong - but I'm not certain I am ;)

You can tell that by the white stripe at the top of the beak, quite clearly shown in the second pic I posted.

Do you mean the cere? I think a lot of pigeons have a white cere. There's no hard and fast rule apparently as to what age they change colour from brown to whatever colour they end up as, and some don't change at all.

[edit: they also can get brighter with sexual maturity; coming into "season" and moulting - I'm hoping hers is the colour it is because she moulted her baby feathers, rather than the former two]

My back garden is absolutely impossible to keep cats out of. It's in a row of gardens with eminently walkable walls for pussy cats to stroll about on and leap up and down from. It's also really quite small, (about one-third the size of the front garden) and barely gets any sun.

@Admiral

That's okay. He not around to get offended by anything anymore.

That's a very difficult sentence to say "I'm glad" to for obvious reasons...

I didn't mean any mental anguish if any for it.

And none was caused :) other than by that puss cat of course - who I'm sure thought I was quite quite mad to take offence to his erm..."services"

@moomin

Perhaps pigeons that will receive the Dickin Medal (the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross) like Commando:)

Yes :) they must really be amongst the youngest of the youngest when it comes to serving with the British Navy... hold on... it was the other way round wasn't it... ;)

I will be going off now to be quite busy carrying out some of the good ideas I had last night. I will pop in after bedtime with an update. In the meantime, I hope everyone has a nice day :)

One of my good ideas that I began implementing yesterday morning, progressed exactly nowhere to day because it poured with rain throughout. Monday is supposed to be better though, so I hope it is, because from Tuesday onwards, I'm not going to have much time free for continuing with it for awhile.

I was a bit worried about her yesterday :( She showed very little interest in any kind of food and wouldn't leave the inner "sleeping section" of the hutch. She seemed to have had water though. I really don't want to fuss her, or handle her too much - because she's a wild thing, and a wild thing that learns to trust us lot isn't always safe in our company. But by late afternoon - I thought I'd better take a closer look and I noticed that whilst she flapped a bit at the intrusion, it was only with her left wing. Her right one stayed closed :(

I couldn't feel or see any reason for it though, and whilst I considered strapping it up (as per a guide I found on you tube) I decided against it - on the basis that the bones in both wings felt exactly the same - no breaks or swellings or bruising beneath the feathers, so instead, just gently extended the wing out for her a few times, which she would then fold closed against her body after each extension (which I took as a good sign).

I put her through it again this morning. Okay, she then spent the bulk of the remainder of the day in the darkest recesses of the hutch, but this evening, when I went to repeat the process, she actually managed a teensy flap with that wing. So I'm leaning towards thinking it's a muscular strain, or lactic acid buildup from Friday's misadventures, which has caused her to stiffen up a bit. I hope that's all it is.

Today's pigeon post, people will be in bullet-point form... or something vaguely resembling it, like say... a numbered list! :)

Or perhaps not. It's difficult to say really as I've only just started typing it.

Monday's weather was significantly better so, as I would be out in the garden continuing with my good idea and reliably able to serve as a neighbourhood-feline-insurgents-deterrent, I thought it might be nice to let her stretch her legs (and maybe even her wings) beyond the confines of the hutch, so she could enjoy breakfasting in the company of other pigeons that might drop by, as well as the other garden birds.

At first it was just our little garden residents who came down and she joined in with them quite readily getting stuck into a stale croissant I'd scattered about for them. Some of the former mentioned were right piggies though - flying off into the hedge with chunks bigger than themselves :) and the robin's babies (all five of them) were sooooooo cute I didn't get anything done at all. But it was still early so I didn't let that bother me.

But from the moment the sound of the first pigeon's wings (flapping prior to its arrival, and soon followed by a few more) our little girl, whom my son has christened Tinks btw :) because of the faint noises that emanate from the hutch while she's eating, became utterly petrified :( She went into this sort of awful blind panic in an attempt to escape what I presume she thought was auguring another cat attack.

I thought that might abate - once she gathered enough of her wits to work out she was still amongst the living and merely in the company of feathered friends, not furry hunters - but it just got worse and because I was becoming really worried she was going to hurt herself, I decided to retrieve her and put her back in the hutch.

And back into its darkest recess she fled :( So that was Monday, and my incentive to continue work on creating her a larger more airy, natural setting for her to get better in seemed pretty pointless. I've not given up on it - but I've decided against finishing it in a hurry.

On a positive note though - yesterday afternoon as I got home and got my keys out to open the front door, she popped her head out of that said dark recess - and whilst she didn't come out of it entirely - it was nice to see she felt confident enough to play peek-a-boo :)

feral pigeons are known to carry psittacosis

Visit sites claiming they are vermin, sir, and indeed, one's view will lean toward wholesale extermination. Its prevalence amongst house-pets of the parrot family must then too be of great concern one would suppose?

@Anniet: good luck with this endeavour.

I meant to pop in last night - well it would have actually been the early hours of this morning but I got too tired all of a sudden, just like that, so I didn't :)

And other than a quick no progress report on her using her right wing, there's not really much to say on her learning to fly. The sudden heavy rainfall we had on Wednesday morning (that I managed to not get wet in for once thanks to appointments having being scheduled in a perfectly synchronised manner to let me just dodge huge puddles and not deluges) gave me the opportunity to note pretty much every pigeon I saw on my travels willingly, and quite amusingly, forming wet fluffed up mounds in the middle, deepest parts of the best there were available. So! Once I was home I thought Tinks might really enjoy that too! :)

I may have already mentioned it, but we have this really quite cute, reasonably spacious, soft canvas-netting and plastic fold-away guinea-pig run that my daughter's guinea-pigs used to get transferred to for a few hours of supervised-safe freedom in the garden. Tinks has been in it a few times now because my thinking is that it gives her more room to stretch her wings (assuming she wants to) without the risk of bashing them against wood and/or metal. The first time she'd been mostly horrified at this new depravity that had been foisted upon her, but she'd got over that the second time :)

Anyway, I thought it would be the perfect place to set her up with her own puddle, and in many ways I made her a beautiful one. Out of a plastic paint roller tray (that had somehow been overlooked for use as a paint-roller tray last decorating spree). It gave her a wade-in, non-slip shallow end and everything...

*long-winded ... wounded blink* ...and she frankly, hated it.

Yes, I know... I was offended... but it has occurred to me that she's unlikely to have learned to like it. She'd have hatched out during that very hot dry spell and so won't have even experienced damp parents coming back to feed her, let alone learned from observing her elders the way a flying youngster would have. So I'm now contemplating improvising a puddle in the garden.

Uh-oh... I'm being interrupted... I'll finish this off later...

@previous post: Thanks you for the good luck :) It's greatly appreciated.

I've seen pigeons eat fag ends, so they don't seem very picky.

(Cigarette butts, for our non-British cousins)

I have seen pigeons eat pop corn.

---

Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge.

I've seen pigeons eat fag ends, so they don't seem very picky.

They weren't listed as an ingredient in substitute crop milk though... I'd have remembered ;) but generally they don't come across as very picky eaters at all, I have to agree. This one would stuff herself with peanuts all day and little else if she could :)

I've definitely seen snails eat cigarette ends. Going by the ones I confiscated some from, they tend not to sail about on their foot in straight lines afterwards though, but in rather disturbed looking orbits whilst exhibiting a listing gait with their shells sort of leaning wonkily to one side, which might in itself account for the circles, although I can't be certain of that. They also really like stripping off the coloured printed overlay on boxes of cereals and similar packaging type materials when they get the chance. That can't be particularly good for them either, but as I don't have a current patient in the snail wing, I'll stop talking about them and drone on about pigeons again instead for a bit. It's lovely to see you again by the way, Simonator :)

Now... Let me see... where did I get to?

So I'm now contemplating improvising a puddle in the garden.

Yes, I am... to see if (once she stops entirely freaking out when they arrive and hiding herself) she can learn by watching other pigeon-visitors using it instead. There has been some not-insignificant progress in reducing her panic button deployments, though, which is a bit yay :)

Where we'd regressed to was this:



I do know she wasn't entirely bereft of feathered company because she was getting some rather frequent visits from the baby sparrows - mostly to steal her food admittedly, but they were leaving the larger peanuts for her and had given up trying to get out of the hutch carrying crusts of bread with them because the width of the bars was thwarting those heists ;)

Then, once she was prepared to take a brief curiosity break from pasting herself to the back wall of the sleeping area and stay long enough for me to take a picture...



I did :)

She got braver still the following day... but so fleetingly, it was really quite hard to catch it on camera, although...



...eventually - paparazzi style - I caught her at it ;)

And then, this afternoon... (which because of the time I'm saying that is actually yesterday afternoon now) not only did she venture out of "bed"...



...she also didn't flee back into it when a few pigeons helicoptered into the garden either!



She's now extremely interested in some work I'm doing on creating her a ground floor extension (which I'm hoping to have finished by the end of the weekend because I'm not enjoying seeing her so cooped up).

Her brain damaged friend has not returned to the garden, which is a bit sad :( but also probably in her best interests really. The last time he crashed by was Tuesday. I'd like to think he's doing fine somewhere, but I do have big doubts on that being even remotely possible.

On the disease thing that was raised earlier in the thread. I did have a really good link that put everything into perspective for those with concerns. I'll rummage around for it, and post it once I've located it.

This is one hell of a project you have taken on. I really enjoy your progress reports but I'm not very optimistic.
I wish you and the bird well.

---

Annie,

These are baby pigeons sitting on next doors fence. As you can see they are a very light grey compared to their fully grown adults, and they can fly very well indeed. I would say that going by the colour of your pigeon it is a young adult with a problem. It is either injured or has some birth deformity which prevents it from flying.

I think the grey birds are not pigeons, but another related species called a "Eurasian Collared Dove".