Could it have been an omen?
Could it have been an omen? A good one, I hope.
A pigeon perched on my windowsill today. A poem that immediatly came to mind was D.H.Lawrence's "Snake".
A snake came to my water trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat
To drink there.
It is the first time I saw that happen here, as I am on the 25th floor of a high rise and it's somewhat unusual to find a bird that's normally milling about on the ground in public parks being fed seeds and crumbs by people. You can see from this photo taken from a different window, from the reflection in the glass, the street below. As I used a telephoto lens and cropped the photo considerably it does not look so high as it actually is.
It was banded, as you can see on its right foot. It stayed for a couple of hours so I quietly opened the window and dropped some crumbs on the sill. However, it then turned around to face the opposite direction, ignored the food and a few minutes later flew away. I sort of hoped to see a nest built there that I could watch to see eggs laid, then fledgelings emerging from them, but no such luck.
However, I'm still left with the mystery - was it an omen?
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A pigeon came to my window,
On a cool, cool day, and I in a t-shirt for the comfort
To watch there.
Of course telephoto lenses make distant things look closer, and larger. But they also tend to "compress space"-- things look closer to each other.
(Wide angle lens do the opposite. They tend to make things look further apart from each other. In shooting a room, they tend to make things look "more spread out", giving the illusion of that the room is bigger than it actually is. That's why real estate brokers and others trying to sell the building like to use wide-angle lenses for interior shots-- the premises look much larger than they really are!)
Maybe it was a homing pigeon but he got the wrong address .
Well, he did leave a deposit on the sill.
Dear Friend Buzz: Time to check my Omenclature.
Smiles.
E.
Buzz,
Lovely pics of the moment.
No it is not an omen. The omen by Portuguese folklore is that if a bird flies into your home, it brings death. I don't believe that either.. having a bird in my home.
He is a homing pigeon (they get banded). He just made a pit stop (or in his case a potty break) on your window on the way home.
Buzz, it looks pretty high to me! And fascinatingly colorful!
I think that if it IS an omen, it's a good one!
You need one of the in-window bird feeders... I had one, (still do, somewhere), and they have that 2-way glass in them. The bird sees a mirror, but you see the bird. I bet if you got one of those, and put seeds in it, you'd have lots of visitors!
This one looks a lot like the one I had-- except the top of mine was a bit wider. It had a large hole with a cork in it, so you could pour seeds in it.
PIGEONS - EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT THE PIGEON
Table of Contents
Latin Name: Columba livia (dove or bird of leaden or blue-grey colour).
Common Names: Pigeon, dove, blue rock pigeon, rock dove, wild rock pigeon, rock pigeon, feral pigeon.
Derivation: The word pigeon is derived from the Latin word pipio, meaning young cheeping bird. The word dove is of Norse origin and first appeared in the 14th century as dova or douve.
Bird Order: Columbiformes
Family: Columbidae (includes 315 different species)
Subspecies: C. l. livia, C. l. atlantis, C. l. canariensis, C. l. gymnocyclus, C. l. targia, C. l. nigricans, C. l. dakhlae, C. l. schimperi, C. l. intermedia, C. l. palaestinae, C. l. gaddi, C. l. neglecta
Varieties: 350 recorded varieties.
Most Common: Feral Pigeon - 10-15 million in Europe.
Origin: Europe, North Africa and Asia.
Habitat: The wild pigeon is found in coastal areas and the feral pigeon is found almost exclusively in areas of human habitation.
Distribution: Worldwide except Sahara Desert, Antarctica and the high Arctic. European population estimated at between 17 and 28 million birds.
Description (adult of the nominate subspecies of the rock pigeon):
Reproduction:
More info than I need - thanks.
Not really worth the expense and effort - there are so few birds here, and the ones that are stay in the trees, not 25 floors up.
It was a omen Buzz...''pigeon shit to follow''.
As I said above, it did leave a deposit - but it's nothing like the amount of shit that fills the Front Page these days.