The world is on fire, but here's a nice thing. A few months ago, a pigeon laid two eggs under our outdoor furniture on our balcony. We put a camera in there to keep an eye. The eggs hatched, survived, grew up, flapped their wings, and left the nest. 😊 Here's what happened & what we learned.
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@zackwhittaker Thank you Zack! 🐦
@zackwhittaker Cool! Love the story! We have wood pigeons - they will nest any time they think the weather is feasible & they are terrible at building nests. They are resilient survivors.
@zackwhittaker
A lovely thread to wake up to this morning.
Thank you.
@zackwhittaker I loved every bit of this 😍🥺
@zackwhittaker
Pidgeons are notoriously horrible at building nests. Which is wild since they apparently do the whole baby-process in winter. O.o
Maybe it has something to do how widely they were domesticated in a big part of humab history and it fucked some of them up? They got used to having human-made shelters and now they have evolved at being about as good as building nests as a toddler would be at building a house from scratch.
(This is just my thinking)
@zackwhittaker Thank you for this! I love pigeons and think they are just misunderstood. Every time my mum calls them "flying rats" I get all riled up, haha. This was a lovely series of posts. Yay for successful coparenting - helps that they had a kind-hearted landlord throughout all of it.
@zackwhittaker must be AI. Birds aren't real.
@zackwhittaker Wonderful! Thanks for posting.
In mid-November, we found our cat Theo transfixed at the window. He was looking at a pigeon and two eggs, just plonked there on the astroturf. As it turns out, pigeons are quite shit at making nests (https://defector.com/why-do-pigeon-nests-look-so-shitty-an-investigation), and it was already starting to get cold out in the NY/NJ area.
We wanted to keep watch to make sure they were doing OK, while not interfering (because nature, y'know?). We knew nothing about pigeons, but were honored that this pigeon chose our balcony to raise their young, so of course this was fine.
Soon after Birdcam went live… holy shit, it's *two* pigeons!
We soon found that these pigeons would take turns nesting on these eggs, sometimes do a little dance and coo at each other when they would swap, maybe once or twice a day, presumably so they both could go out and eat. To see these birds take such care of their eggs was adorable.
Meanwhile, let's take a look at their nest and… granted, not much improvement.
(Yes, this is a cybersecurity, cat, and pigeon stan account now.)
It was getting colder and colder throughout November, getting down to almost freezing temperatures, high winds, and increasingly harsher weather. I secured some cardboard to the balcony railings so that it would shelter the pigeons from the elements.
OK, so I interfered a little bit, shuddup. :).
Then two weeks later on Dec. 1, Birdcam sent a notification to new activity. I opened my phone and saw this new video.
Narrator voice: Player three has entered the game.
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