revenge of the pigeons

While I had not had kamikaze pigeons hitting my windows for quite a while…, it may be that one of them decided to move to biological warfare: when I came back from Edinburgh, my office at the University was in a terrible state as a bird had entered through a tiny window opening and wrecked havoc on the room, dropping folders and rocks from my shelves and… leaving a most specific proof of its visit. This bird was particularly attracted by and aggressive against the above book, Implementing Reproducible Research, standing on top of my books to review for CHANCE. Obvious disclaimer: this reflects neither my opinion nor the University opinion about the book contents, but only the bird’s, which is solely responsible for its action!

Art brut

Not again!!! [home 4-0 pigeon]

This morning, as I was working in my office, I head a thud and, yes, once again, a bird had crashed in my window… The suicidal dove had returned! Once again it had not died from the suicide attempt but it only left a few feathers on the window and remained dazed for a while…

home 3-0 pigeon

This is getting into a kind of custom: on each year at this time, a pigeon crashes into one of the windows of our house and the crash leaves an imprint that I always find impressive as a sort of ultimate picture! (This happened in 2008 and 2009, hence the title.) This year, I did not hear the crash nor did I find any trace of the poor bird so it either survived the crash or got eaten by a cat, feathers and all…. The picture is not as impressive as in 2008 (or as in this Flickr picture), which may explain for the softer hit!

Startled starling

After a pair of doves died when trying to break in my house, a young starling only got dazed from hitting my window this morning. I head a bang and came to see a magpie attacking a young starling—without the characteristic white dots—while an older starling—with the white dots—was trying to chase the magpie away. When I opened my window, both the magpie and the older starling went away but the younger one, while alive, could not fold its wings. I called my daughter and we put the bird in a window corner on a pile of newspapers with a cup of water. After a while, the poor bird got on its legs and  hesitantly stood in the sun. A few minutes later, when we came back to check, the bird had gone away. There were a few down feathers nearby so it may be that a lucky cat found a free meal there (!), but, even though the neighbourhood is full of cats chasing birds, I doubt this is the case as we usually find a few more traces of those cat meals. Anyway, there are so many birds hitting our windows that I start to wonder if our house was built on an avian Uluru of sorts…!