Skippy does the same thing!! I’ve no idea why exactly he does it either, but my guess is it’s related to being horny in some way since usually I see them do it in between bouts of feeding their mate and a lot of the time it’s followed by them getting it on for real in the end.

Oh yeah also almost forgot to tag it for #pigeonsky

Have some happy rescue news to brighten your morning as it did mine after so many recent birds I couldn’t manage to save too! 🥹

They’re all super adorable - which makes it all the more sad to know that this little one’s suffering was entirely preventable to begin with. It’s neither sick nor injured, it just couldn’t find enough food in the city and almost starved to death because of it. 😔

Normally a pigeon this age should be weighing at least 250-300gr, “5 weeks of age and 250gr of weight” are the recommendations for PMV vaccination for example, a healthy pigeon manages that easily.
So this one we weren’t even sure if it’d survive the night tbh. 🥲

It’s still got a long way to go now of course, and I’ll need to check for any underlying diseases that might endanger its recovery now that it’s so weak already too, but considering it was a meagre 190gr of weight yesterday, this is a huuuge step forward already.

Yeah I reckon it’s maybe 6-8 weeks old at most? Didn’t even notice me approaching it until I actually touched it, and even then it hardly resisted being picked up. It was really cold already too then, I’m pretty sure it had just huddled up by the stairs to literally die.

Thanks, from what I understand about the colour genetics that does sound pretty plausible. I figured ash red and bar were the base, but I’m not particularly great at identifying all the many modifiers that exist yet. Super interesting stuff though!

Dang that really is one heck of an orange pigeon! I’m not the most knowledgable about pigeon genetics, maybe @graemeboyd.bsky.social can enlighten us with some details about this bird? Definitely within the range of the possible for fancy pigeons though.

Define orange, you mean like neon orange? Or more like a faded reddish brown that looks kinda orange?
The former could be spray paint, often used for racing pigeons but pigeons do also come in a variety of bred colours in the red and brown spectrum

So far so good, the eye looks terrible but from what we can tell right now it seems like there isn’t any more serious damage actually, just lots of blood and swelling. As for that whole other thing… one thing at a time, it’s an old wound so there’s only so much we could do either way.

Ngl I don’t have high hopes that the eye can even be saved or that this pigeon wouldn’t be better off euthanised in general, but for now it’s getting all the painkillers and antibiotics and care I can give it, and we’re seeing the vet in a few hours.

Our rescue as a whole also benefits though as the owner of the building is making quite a decent sized donation to our cause - which, you know, means a lot because without money we can’t help any birds either.
Also we can now educate people on the reality of cleaning dirty attics from pigeon poop.

Look, when she was found she was a lil squab caked in poop. No way to tell except for DNA testing… so we just make a lucky guess based on behaviour and it turns out Joachim was a bit of an unusually rowdy girl.
But then suddenly there was a surprise egg.

Although that said I did get a pretty neat free cage out of it all. Was on one of the attic we checked/cleaned and since it was to be thrown away anyway… YOINK, mine now. 👀

We’re doing our best! Which just makes it all the more infuriating really when things like this happen that were just entirely preventable.
Maybe we shoulda just ripped one of those old ass windows out of the wall entirely last week so nobody could even think to close it… 😅

It’s so sad, this was 100% entirely preventable and would’ve saved us four whole hours of work too if only people had done the lazy thing of not effing touching anything they were explicitly notified to leave alone to begin with.