Collateral Damage

Ever seen a pigeon chick? Neither had I until yesterday.

There were two. Barely a week old, blind with dodo beaks, living on a window ledge that the homeowner deemed an inappropriate nesting place. Maybe it was. Pigeons are dirty, noisy creatures - but then who am I to talk.

If I had just asserted myself a little more. Relocated mother and babies together, but I didn’t. I wanted to cause her as little distress as possible, so I moved the chicks to a safe place, thinking she would follow, which of course the myopic bird was cognitively incapable of. She just flapped overhead revisiting the original site of the nest and I became impatient.

I took them back to the window ledge and using a plastic bucket, with the chicks as bait, I hoped to trap her and move them all together. She returned with mistrust and fear, trying just a few tentative pecks at the rim of the unstable bucket. She was distressed, I felt impotent and the owner of the flat was becoming increasingly frustrated with both of us.

The dynamic in the room had changed. The owner paced to and fro, cursing the bird’s pitiful attempts at reclaiming her brood. Frustration turned to annoyance and then to anger. It dawned on me that the objective had changed; it was no longer a case of relocation but of riddance, an end to negotiations with a coup de main.

So whilst the blind mother flew over the remains of her home, I calmly took her two yellow dodo beaks down the stairs, out into the sunshine, to a quiet corner of the garden. There I swaddled them in white tissue and crushed them under a brick.

As I cycled away, my mission complete, I thought I glimpsed a Jackboot, but it was just my trouser tucked into my sock.