A sad end to the story

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Sadly, my story of the pigeon family did not end well. On Monday morning I showed Big One the pigeon nestlings (officially known as squabs) in the nest. For most of the rest of the day I was out. In the early evening we ate outdoors, and saw the pigeon flying to the wisteria vine. But later, as it was going dark and I was just coming in from the garden, I looked up to say ‘Goodnight Pidge’ and she wasn’t there. Next morning I looked out of the window and the nest was empty and deserted. What could have happened? The babies were too young to fly, they didn’t have their flight feathers yet. They could have been taken by a predator such as a magpie, but by now they were a bit too big for that. Eventually I found the bodies in the flowerbed below. Perhaps they just fell out of the nest – but it seems odd that they would both fall, and anyway they wouldn’t necessarily die if they did. In the end I suspect they probably suffered fatal heat exhaustion. On Monday and Tuesday this week we had the hottest temperatures ever recorded in the UK. Temperatures outside in the morning were already in the mid 30s Celsius, and reached over 40 in the afternoon. And that side of the house gets the late afternoon sun. Even under the leaves, the air was so hot and no doubt heat would reflect off the house wall too. Under normal conditions, that would be beneficial, but not in those temperatures. And there wasn’t much poor Mum could do about it. The babies were quite big already and would soon have been able to leave the nest. If only they could have got through those two days – the weather is back to normal again now with temperatures in the mid 20s. That’s just the vagaries of life I guess. Photo shows the wisteria flowering earlier this summer (before I pruned it). All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2022.