Some encounters with our fellow earthlings…
unfettered pets
We have had no more birds pets since then… only dogs. But we have had other birds as guests. Ours is a small home, but there have been several guests who have graced it. There was a pair of doves which built their nest amidst the creepers on the portico. We were priviledged enough to have a birds eye view from the first floor. During those times, we had taken these kind of things for granted, and didnt invade their privacy 🙂 too much. It was nice to hear their “music” all the time. The cute fledglings would be within arms reach if I stood on a stool… and I wanted to hold them… but my grandfather strictly forbidded this… no.. dont interfere, just watch if you like. I was glad I didnt interfere, because they came back again in the next season.
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mirror mirror on the wall, tell me who is the greatest sparrow of them all
There were other guests… one sparrow kept flying inside our house to peck furiously at its image in a mirror. This was a big square shaving mirror which had a holder on which it could stand on, and it would spend all day maybe wondering what the other bird was doing pecking at it. And I would spend a lot of time wondering what it was wondering. Eventually the sparrow and his wife even moved inside, building a nest on top of our cupboard and hung around for several years and there were many generations of sparrows flying around all over the place.
One time, tragedy struck, one of them got struck by the ceiling fan. Since then, we made sure they all stayed outside, though the mirror plus feeding station was shifted to our balcony for their entertainment.
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squirrels
We had squirrels coming in for breakfast every morning near the kitchen window. Theres a coconut tree emerging right next to the window through a hole in the roof, this tree was their favourite hangout. My mother used to throw out some food onto the platform next to the window (which forms the roof of the ground floor below). They cautiously come near the window, quickly grab as much as possible and dart up the coconut tree. Funniest part is watching them eat facing downwards on the tree trunk. Some were greedy… they would fight with the food taken by another instead of taking another piece. They would all noisily complain at the slightest delay in service. Sometimes a crow would come and compete with them for the food, though not quite as punctual.
Recently we shifted to the ground floor… and after a lot of protests, the whole group decided to find another food service provider. We still see them quite often.
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bird-brained pigeons
On a weekend I was strolling around Alt Stadt in a German city. Alt Stadt is an old part of any German city (in Bangalore, maybe Brigade Road area mightve been an Alt Stadt). It has cobbled roads and is exclusively for pedestrians, the sole exclusion at some places being trams.
Somebody had spilled a lot of french fries on the road, and a horde of pigeons were feasting on it. This might have been a pretty sight, except that it was right on the tracks of the trams. Time and again, a tram turned up, all the pigeons flew out of the way, and returned to the feast once the tram passed. However one time, a pigeon got killed… luckily the death was instantaneous. It was a live enactment of the old Panchatantra story, of one bird getting too greedy and hanging around for too long on a highway. I was a bit shocked at the scene. It was made much worse by some teenage girl who was screaming hysterically and acting like a real nut… she sat down and cried… then she went and took a close look at the mess… God alone knows why… and screamed again and cried, and it took a while for her to calm down.
However I was bewildered, not by the death of the pigeon nor her nor the driver of the tram or the idiot who had spilled the fries on the tracks in the first place. What I found really strange was the behaviour of the other pigeons. After the tram passed, they just flew back and continued feeding as if nothing had happened at all.
This is quite unlike behaviour I have seen with crows back in Bangalore. If a single crow is injured, the other crows immediately hover around it and make a big racket, and swoop down threateningly at any hapless passerby.
So what is the difference between a crow and a pigeon? They’re both birds. One thing is that crows are very intelligent. They can be quite friendly to humans (if a human tries). They have been known to solve puzzles and even use tools like a stick to get at something (which is quite an extraordinary thing). A little known fact is that they even have the capacity to mimick other birds or to talk, like a parrot, if trained.
Is it that pigeons are too stupid? But they have fantastic homing instincts, so does that make them intelligient? Are they too insensitive to care for one another? Or is that they’re so intelligient and practical that they know that one of them is already dead, theres nothing they can do about it, except continue to eat?
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