A bird in the bush... is best left in the bush

Pooper’s gone and I miss her already. I decided she was a she without googling pics of pigeon anatomy.

She had fallen off the window ledge where her mother had built her nest, into the bushes below, either because of excessive fidgeting or because she was attacked by a predator. And my daughter happened to be among the witnesses to this tragic fall.
My daughter, one of two daughters, to whom I had refused ownership of dogs, cats, mice, squirrels – sentient creatures of any size and shape. Not even plants, for that matter.
(Commitment issues.)

So expecting a no, when she asked me for just a few days of temporary ownership, till the bird was ready to fly away, I couldn’t say no.

During her brief stay with us, four days including today, she pooped relentlessly, mercilessly, all over the common areas of my small house already under duress because my help is sick. I’ve been wiping wet poop, dry poop, soft poop, hard poop, poop in the morning, poop at night like a character in a Dr. Seuss poem. And was warned by an animal-lover friend that soon, as soon as Pooper starts flying, there would also be high poop along with the low poop - poop now in lowly places moving on to stick its tongue out at me from furniture, dining table, curtain rods and other possibilities that I didn’t even want to think about.

Very soon, I was asking myself what had possessed me to say yes.
When I knew she would be ravaging the countryside of my drawing cum dining room. When I have no verandah, no nothing to restrain a frantic little pigeon looking for her mother.

(How long can you shoe-box a pigeon? "A person’s a person", after all, "no matter how small.")

Pooper, giving it a rest

Inspite of our coaxing and cajoling, Pooper drank only a little water – in this summer of recent summers – and ate less. There was, however, absolutely no correlation between her intake and her prodigious output. She was like a genius who, with seemingly no help from Nature or nurture, still astounded and mystified.  And like most geniuses, she was also a source of equal parts joy and despair to her mother, who at the time happened to be me.

By this morning, after going around the house on my knees, using Mr. Muscle Kitchen Cleaner to deal with some blobs of hitherto intractable poop, I was at wits’ end. I had a faint suspicion that if I saw another offering by Pooper, I would start frothing at the mouth or looking up recipes for pigeon soup. Thankfully, salvation arrived in the evening when my friend, who I’d been calling up three times a day for advice on how to handle being a first-time mother to a pigeon, found a way out for me; a way out that would not involve any methods that would burden my conscience. 

Father Vinod, their good friend and lover of all creatures great and small, hairy and scary – he likes tarantulas - was visiting. He informed my older daughter who was at my friend’s place that, judging by her reports, the pigeon would not fly and be able to fend for herself for another month at least. If that was a problem, he could take Pooper with him to his farm.
And that he was leaving tonight.

I almost broke the world-record for the women’s 100 m sprint, to get to my car.