Dan had been hearing what he thought sounded like an owl - almost. We do have owls around, Great Owls mostly, which have a distinctive hoo hoo HOO. But this wasn't like that and we weren't sure if it was an owl at all. The identity of the mystery bird was solved last week when Dan went out to feed the chickens and discovered that a pigeon had joined them.
The pigeon was pecking for scratch in the chicken yard and seemed quite at home, but the chickens were in an uproar. Still, it came back for the next several days and finally the chickens settled down.
One day Dan saw our visitor at the
coop chicken doorway looking in. Checking things out? The next day we
found it inside the coop, cooing away quite happily!
Now it spends the night inside the coop, settled on the roof sill. So it looks like we've got ourselves a volunteer pigeon.
Apparently pigeons are rather difficult to sex, so we don't know if it's a male or female. Dan named it Walter, so if we ever figure out it's female, oh well.
It looks as though Walter has a leg band, so he must have escaped from somewhere. He won't let us get anywhere near enough to try and catch him. I've checked several lost-and-founds, but no one seems to be missing a pigeon. So I guess he's here to stay for as long as he wants.
