Lefty, our lame woodpigeon, has disappeared and we fear the worst. He has vanished before for a couple of weeks or so at a time, usually later in the summer, when we guessed that he might be quietly moulting somewhere and living off the abundance of seeds and fruits out in the local fields; but this time his mate Mrs Lefty is still around, solitary and looking rather forlorn, and we think it unlikely that he would have left her un-chaperoned for any length of time. There are no signs of a fight, no giveaway piles of feathers in the garden or crushed remains in the lane, and no indication as to what might have happened to him; and no body to bury.
I feel particularly bad about it, because just before we
last saw him I had intervened in his attempts, with his lady, to build a nest
in the wisteria. In fact, I pulled the sticks
that formed the beginnings of the nest out of the plant, and gave it an early
summer prune to remove the concealing cover from the site. It’s illegal in the UK to disturb a bird’s
nest, but I seriously doubted that the wisteria would be strong enough to
support the activity of a woodpigeon’s nest – they’re heavy birds - and I knew too
that the squirrel climbs the plant (and squirrels will eat birds’ eggs). I left the sticks on the patio below the nest
site so that the pigeons could use them to build elsewhere, but they’re mostly untouched. Mrs Lefty is now periodically finding sticks
and trying sporadically to rebuild in the wisteria, but I assume this is just
her instinct kicking in (displacement activity) and don’t expect anything to
come of it; otherwise she sits on one of their favourite perches alone, waiting in vain.
We first saw Lefty, with his bad left leg – what looked like a dislocated hip – in 2013. At 10 years old he did pretty well for a woodpigeon. We don’t know whether his disability was congenital or the result of an accident or fight; if the latter, he might have been even older. He managed well enough, limping around and taking on any other pigeon that displeased him; he was a determined and fearless scrapper, on one memorable occasion even facing down a sparrowhawk that landed on the birdbath. We’ll miss seeing the old bruiser coming energetically hobbling down the path for his breakfast, seeing off any potential rivals and occasionally enjoying a soak in the birdbath; one of my last sightings of him with Mrs Lefty was them sitting together on the lawn, like an old married couple, preening in the sun.
RIP Lefty.
