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Just ask the animals, and they will teach you. Ask the birds of the sky, and they will tell you.
JOB 12:7
I never planned to become a pigeon fancier. My husband never planned to become a pigeon’s first love. George swooped in with his own set of plans.
He did not swoop in, actually. Nothing so grandiose or graceful. He was unceremoniously dropped off in a cardboard box. Some well-meaning friends found him walking down a busy road one day, not far from a car-flattened co-hatchling that looked just like him and was probably from the same nest. These friends figured he was in trouble and knew I did wildlife rehab, so they scooped him up, named him George for some reason, and brought him our way. He may or may not actually have been in trouble, but now that he was in our lives, we were the ones in trouble. We just didn’t know it yet.
Honestly, George was the homeliest thing I had ever seen. (Or almost. It’s hard to look worse than a neonate pinkie, but he came close.) You know how something can be so ugly it’s cute? He was not that. Not by a long shot. He was just plain homely, with his little yellow fuzzies sticking up all over his body and his massive, misshapen-looking beak. (It wasn’t misshapen, but it sure looked it.) Have you ever seen a nestling pigeon? They’re kind of scary looking. If they were a hundred sizes bigger, they would be shoo-ins for starring in monster movies. And you have to feed them by shooting goo down their throats.
I had not dealt with a pigeon before George. It took a while to learn to feed him properly. It took a lot of peas, too, which oddly is one food that suits baby pigeons nicely. Their parents feed them crop milk—a secretion from their crop lining (an enlarged part of the esophagus) that both pigeon parents regurgitate straight into their hatchlings’ mouths (another odd thing about them). It’s mighty hard milk to reproduce, but peas are a handy substitute, along with some baby bird food slimed down with water into the requisite gooey consistency and delivered via a syringe without a needle.
Pigeon George at intake
George loved it all, peas and gooey food alike. He feathered out splendidly into a kaleidoscope of color. He grew and grew. He was ungrateful, whereas I had been kind of hoping for some gratitude. He did not fall in love with me, even though I worked so hard to take care of him. He fell in love with Michael. He just could not get enough of my husband. My theory is that they were thrown together too much. As George was fledging and spending time learning to zoom around the yard, my husband was redoing the siding on our old farmhouse. (It looks great now, although it would look even better if he had let me choose the color. But that’s an issue for another day in a book on marital accord, or discord.) Michael spent hours every day outdoors, working on the siding. Consequently, George spent hours every day adopting him as a surrogate parent. Never mind the hand that was feeding him.
So George fell in love, and Michael found himself in a love/hate relationship with a pigeon. How could anyone not love the beautiful bird a now-older George had become, with his snow-white body and his blue, green, and iridescent purple trim feathers? How could anyone not hate the way George landed on Michael every time he came out of the house? George bit his ear for fun and dive-bombed everyone who dared get near enough to my husband to talk to him. George was not about to share his first love with anyone else.
Getting the Last Laugh
We and our misguided pigeon/lovebird soon became the laughingstocks of our friends and neighbors. But once George targeted them for reprisal, they usually stopped laughing pretty quickly, while George got the last laugh. People had to admit that George made an excellent guard pigeon, and a general deterrent to unwanted—and wanted—visitors.
Alas, my youngest daughter ended up among those visitors we wanted around but whom George did not. For some reason clear only to his little birdy brain, he took a particular dislike to Dawn—much to the frustration of my new son-in-law, who has since been known to talk of nefariously doing away with said guard pigeon.1
Pigeon George is an excellent example of wildlife rehabilitation gone wrong. They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but I don’t know about that anymore. I could not get George to head out into the bush so we could decide. I called a favorite rehab mentor and asked her (begged her) for advice. I told her we thought that maybe we could take George downtown where other pigeons lived and release him amongst his own kind, but I did not want to do that without her input. It is easy to condemn rehabbed animals to death by starvation or predation if they are not released properly into a suitable environment.
George foiled our plans again, as did my mentor. When she was growing up, one of her close relatives had kept pigeons, and she laughed until she cried when she heard my tale of woe. “Of course you can take him downtown and release him,” she said. “Take him anywhere you want! But he’s a pigeon that has basically grown up at your place. As soon as you release him, he’ll take off for home and possibly beat you back to the house!” (Why was this reminding me so much of the Ringtail Gang? They beat me home too. Juvenile wildlife is so delinquent.)
“Are you kidding?” I said. “But wouldn’t he want to stay with his own kind, look for a mate, and raise a family?”
“Sounds to me as if George already has a mate. He chose your husband! He’ll come right home to him,” she told me. “Just be glad it’s a pigeon and not something worse.”
What does she mean by that? I wondered. I hope I never find out…
“Pigeons are great fun and perfectly legal to keep without a special permit,” she added. (I could still hear her chuckling in the background.) “And it sounds as if George has decided to keep you. I think your husband has himself a personal pigeon pal for life.”
We tried a couple of times to give George a new love interest by buying him some pals from a “pigeon farm” that raised birds for shooting practice (poor things, but at least the price was right at five dollars each). We had high hopes for our matchmaking schemes, but they never quite panned out. One bird took off for its old home despite all our efforts to follow expert advice and acclimate it properly to its new home. (It wasn’t going back to a promising future.) A couple of other birds we bought hung around for good, but they turned out to be males! (It seems sexing young pigeons is nearly impossible even for many pigeon experts.) That scenario of inadvertently bringing in some competition didn’t go over well with George at all, so we have since stopped trying to become pigeon matchmakers and have resigned ourselves to letting him run his own love life.
Who Wears the Pants?
George came in for rehab in August, somewhat late in the season. There was no way he was leaving our place for life on his own before his first winter hit. As I said, there was no way he was leaving our place at all, as far as he was concerned. That’s how I went from being a wildlife rehabilitator to being a pigeon fancier—or at least being a pigeon keeper. Fancier was a bit of a stretch.
Cold weather came along, and George took to sitting on top of our porch light by the door for warmth. My husband simply could not stand sitting in the warm house and wondering if George might be too cold. Before I knew it, George was in the house a lot, sitting on the back of Michael’s office chair.
Chatting with Pigeon George
Really? I thought. Isn’t there enough for me to clean up already with the rehab critters outside and the domestic critters inside? I wasn’t happy about cleaning up pigeon poo in a formerly pigeon-poo free household, so my husband came up with a plan. He built that bird a warm and dry pigeon condo right outside our door. It was gorgeous! I would have lived in it. And he attached it right to the side of the house, next to George’s favorite porch/pigeon warming light. George could hop back and forth from the top of the light into his straw-filled, windbreaker condo anytime. He loved it! He slept in it every night, but only after turning around and around in it several times while cooing his unceasing delight.
I can’t say visitors to our household were equally delighted by the new arrangement of having George live just above our main entryway. He soon took it upon himself to fiercely defend his territory. Heaven help the people who came along and reached up a hand toward his pigeon condo in fascination, exclaiming “What a beautiful bird!” Their very next exclamation was always a mortified “He bites!”
Sure enough, he bites. Still does—usually me. But only when I put my hand anywhere near him without grasping him firmly, keeping all my exposed skin well out of reach of his beak. He doesn’t break the skin, thankfully, but he has become quite the expert at grabbing hold and pinching. Most of the time it happens when I am filling his food bowl (the ingratitude).
To my consternation, the fact that George now had a pigeon condo to call home did not keep him out of our home. Somehow, both he and my husband had taken a liking to him being inside with us. He was more of a regular visitor than most of our friends (or former friends) who had run afoul of his self-appointed sentry duty at the door. So somehow, even though he had a fancy home just outside the door and a personal warming light, I was still cleaning up pigeon poo. Something had to be done.
Pigeon pants. That had to be the answer.
Is that a real thing? you ask.
It is. I direct you to Google, where I searched to see if I could find a solution to our pigeon problems. Sure enough, I googled “pigeon care” and up came a pigeon-and-dove rescue organization website. Sure enough, those exist too, even though George had ended up at the Lion’s Den instead of one of those. The website I looked at kindly included a section titled “What Are Pigeon Pants?” Therein, I read that rescued pigeons unreleasable into the wild make passable indoor pets, especially if they are wearing pigeon pants. (Are pigeons wild? Are they domestic? I don’t know. Neither does George.) For me, that whole idea begged the question, What am I supposed to do with a rescued, releasable pigeon that simply prefers to be indoors? But there was nothing much to help me there.
The pigeon pants, however, come in myriad designer fabrics and colors, so that was helpful to know. None of them were cheap, mind you. Who knew that there was such a market for fashionable pigeon clothing? You outfit your bird in style, put a piece of paper towel or a tissue in the specially made beneath-the-tail pocket, and no more messy poo dots your furniture! The pants contain it all. Wonder of wonders, each pair of pigeon pants even comes with a little loop attached and a soft leash so you can take your indoor pigeon outdoors for a walk and not lose it. For me, that begged another question: But what if I want to lose it?
This and other pigeon sites assume that you want to outfit your pigeon in pants and have it in the house with you. Truly, this concept had never occurred to me, and at first I brushed it off as silly. Who would want to do that and pay fashion designer prices for the privilege?
It turns out we would. It didn’t take too much more cleaning of poo before I decided that pigeon pants were absolutely the most brilliant invention I had ever heard of. I chose a bright blue pair that I thought would match our bird, forked over my credit card number and address, and waited by the mailbox. One momentous day, the pigeon pants arrived. They were really something, although I didn’t know whether to laugh at their unusual appearance or cry at the price on the invoice. But now at least I had a plan I thought would work well for everyone involved. I hoped George would be as impressed with it as I was.
Not so. Have you ever tried to put pigeon pants on a nippy pigeon that does not want to wear them? At all. Ever. To my deep disappointment, our adopted pigeon made it clear that he would not be adopting my new plan. He also made it very clear who wears the pants in this family. He does—at least figuratively.
I still have the pigeon pants in their original package, and I take them out and admire them once in a while. George never gives them a second glance. To this day he “wears the pants,” but he is never going to wear the pants.
1To watch an amusing “George guards the door!” video in which Pigeon George strongly suggests that Dawn (the camera person) takes a hike, visit my website at www.trishann.com and click on the “Raccoon Gangs Book” tab at the top. Scroll down to the “Videos from the book” section, and when you view this one under the arrow, wait for what George does right at the end!