So I'm now raising a pigeon.

Did you know:

Pigeons mate for life and once nested, lay two eggs at a time thus raising only two chicks at a time?

Well, the cat got one and I'm raising the other.



This started because our house is starting to fall apart more quickly than I can renovate it. (On the outside, at least, from the winter. The previous owners had aluminum siding put on so that the house is enclosed in a safe and tidy sheath of thin metal plates, but the eaves--that bit right under the edge of the roof--are starting to fall off, so there were plates missing. Holes in the armor, as it were, and it reached the tipping point where I had to get on the ladder and remove the rest rather than waiting for them to fall over the next year.)

Um. So I removed most of them, revealing a few water-damaged boards, but more importantly, that the house was more solid than I had expected. Solid enough for pigeons to be roosting in the eaves, I found out, as the nest and a pair of young squabs tumbled down.

Climbing down from the ladder, I saw that they were fine. I put them in a small handy container then went inside to look for something more suitable.

I found a larger box with a lid. On my way back out I ran into Poppy--Jessica's feral rescue cat--coming in the house with one of the pigeons in her mouth.

You'd think that there is some amount of furious cursing and vitriol that would make a cat blanch and drop dead, because I haven't cursed creatively at anything like that since the service, half my life ago. She froze, startled, but she wasn't going to give up her prize. She disappeared quickly.

So now there's one, living in a neighbor's borrowed coop. He's almost an adult but can't fly quite yet. He's mostly feathered and quite handsome actually, very dark with gray highlights. He likes to be held, coos, and will roost on your arm happily while his shredded-paper nest is changed.

Jessica has named him Dingdong. He'll fit right in with our special-ed menagerie.