The pigeon entered our lives quite matter-of-factly but, all the same, the event was shrouded in an air of strangeness. Why did he choose precisely Jenny's door, among all the doors he could have chosen on the long corridor on the second story of jenny's block of residential flats? How did he gain entry to the block of flats anyway, all access doors to the street always being closed? Could he have hatched in some recess on the cliff behind the block, and might his parents have been chased away or murdered by a cat, and could it be that he had somehow escaped detection by the cat, and had come now to present himself at jenny's door, somehow intuitively seeking her protection?
We first heard his soft call from inside the flat and did not know whence it came and hence thought nothing of it. Then about twenty minutes later we heard it again, clear and insistent. This time Jenny opened the door and he waddled straight into the flat, as if he had been waiting to do just that. He was very small; it seemed that he couldn't have been more than a few days out of his egg. He had a strange swollen knobbly beak and a self-assured manner. I thought that he probably belonged the goose family, and suspected that he was of Asian origin. Jenny agreed that he looked strange, but had a hunch that he could be a pigeon. After some searching online, sure enough, she came across a photo of a young pigeon whose appearance corresponded exactly with our little chick's. We learned that the knobbly beak is only found in the young, and is replaced by a stronger one in adulthood. We learned that of all birds the pigeon family is the most widespread and numerous, and that strictly speaking there is no agreed upon way to say when a pigeon is not also a dove.
Jenny's childhood on a finca in rural Paraguay was filled with intimate animal friendships, from a horse and cows to pet parrots and a pet monkey, from a pet rat called fred whom she would smuggle into her school classes in the pocket of her coat, to a hen who would follow her as she walked several kilometres to school and wait for her by the school gate to then walk home with her after classes. Could little pigeon have somehow sensed Jenny's love for all animals or why else would he have waited and called insistently like that at her door?
In any event Jenny soon took him under her wing, making him a little nest under a leafy plant pot and feeding him by making a bottle of bird paste, pecked at by him through a hole in a condom stretched over the bottle opening (which, Jenny read, simulates the experience of having to reach into mama's beak.) It wasn't always easy to ensure that he was eating enough and it required a fair amount of patience and dedication on Jenny's part.
Jenny's love of animals, or perhaps her maternal instinct, made her instinctively help out pigeon, but it was to become a relationship not without its frustrations. Although I still catch myself calling him just pigeon, Jenny has come to call him Taubi (Taube being the german for pigeon.) Taubi would shit indiscriminately all over the balcony, which hindered hanging up clothes to dry there. He was free to fly off and discover the world if he wanted to (which any parent or parental representative would have wished of him) but instead he would perch there for hours cooing and purring and dancing himself into a trance. He is not exactly a normal pigeon. He is mostly obsessively attached to Jenny, and will flutter over to wherever she is sitting and, cooing all the time, will perform a purposefully choreographed dance in front of her (which jenny, perhaps correctly, interprets to be a courting dance.) However, he is a single-minded and short-tempered creature, and it is not beyond him to behave aggressively even towards Jenny. Over time he has warmed a little towards me and doesn't usually mind me picking him up, although when he is feeling truculent he is wont to deal me deft martial art swats with one wing, which always catch me unawares. Jenny says he is jealous. Sometimes he feigns to bite all of my fingers, but I don't think he means any harm because it really doesn't hurt. It just tickles. Perhaps it is just his way of showing affection.
We took him to the cave where other wild pigeons would fly past but he never showed any interest in them. We thought that all he needed was to meet a young female pigeon and he would be sorted for life - pigeons being monogamous - but no, he haughtily ignored any interest from other pigeons and didn't even seem fond of the rocky coast around the cave. He might stay for a day or two, but would eventually fly the three kilometres or so back to Jenny's flat and be found invariably back on his balcony, coating everything with his droppings and annoying the neighbours with his mad cooing.
We thought we had found the solution when we took him to the land Jenny had bought above Tierra del Trigo. Surrounded by forested hills, he did seem to like the place more than the cave. He was more contented, less given to his catatonic cooing, and would fly around and accompany Jenny on any outdoor project of hers. However, we soon realised that he only stayed on the land as long as Jenny was also there. If I stayed alone on the land with Taubi, he might stay for a few days with me, but at a certain point would take wing, and in a matter of hours Jenny would report that he had arrived back at the balcony in the south - a distance of perhaps twenty kilometres as the pigeon flies (and at least double by the twisty roads). The homing instinct native to Taubi's breed has in his case been set, seemingly irrevocably, on the balcony of Jenny's flat. Jenny suggests that we could try taking him across the sea to one of the neighbouring Canary islands and see if that doesn't flummox his homebound bind, or, failing that, try mainland Europe.
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