This summer I had a little visitor.. around the second week of July 2001 my mom discovered pigeon eggs on my balcony! I heard of this happening to other people but never have seen or experienced it myself. Matter of fact I have never seen a baby pigeon! No one I know has. With living in a large metropolitan city with thousands of pigeons you would think someone would have seen one but they are a mystery.
I have been told that should I ever experience this, that I should pick up the eggs and toss them. Well.. lol Me? Kill a baby bird? Not likely. I stood there and pondered the mess I'd have. Pigeon poop on my carpeting, etc.. and I still didn't have the heart. There before me were two eggs. Hidden away between some boxes that were meant for storage. In a little hidey-hole all their own. No mom around.
So, I made my decision and also decided to photograph the results for all to see. Here are the pics.. and the story. Sorry for the quality of the pics but trying to sneak in and bend down far and snap a pic fast before I terrorized the mom or the baby wasn't easy. She flew off many times and I was worried I'd scare her right away.
This is what I found. Two perfect eggs. And much larger than I had expected. Not the size of a chicken egg by any means but bigger than I expected. Tucked away between some storage boxes on my carpeting. Seems mom brought a few pieces of straw from somewhere and they were layed out in sort of a semi-circle around the eggs.
I had no idea how long it took for these things to hatch or how long they were already there and just not discovered. A friend of mine did a search on them on the net and found it takes 18 days for pigeon eggs to hatch. So I watched.. I found out that they must have been there considerable time because about 4 days after we discovered them the first egg hatched!
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