Links of the Day for 17 January 2008

This morning I fell back to sleep and had one of those dreams where I got up and got ready for work.  I should have figured out it was a dream when I gathered up all my clothing and headed out to catch the T.  Once I boarded I took a shower on board the trolley in a public shower which replaced the booth for the conductor/door guard.  That was a definite clue that I was not really awake and going to work, because I never take the trolley!  Sounds like a good idea though to have showers on public transit.  Imagine the efficiency for those of us who are always running late to work!

Anyhow, it was one of those days, so here are some links:

• For kids: Watch it – this art is on the move! by Sue Wunder (Christian Science Monitor, 1/8/08) – I experienced the Clouds exhibition at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art.  There were a bunch of school kids playing with the clouds and it would have made a great photo, but photography was prohibited and I’m a flagrant rule follower.  It just occurred to me that visit to the art museum will be 10 years ago on January 22nd.  Man am I old!
• The Secret History of the Revolving Door by J Morrison (nonist, 1/10/08) – an amusing if perhaps factually challenged history to be sure.
• Actual Urban Nature Post by Jef Taylor (The Urban Pantheist, 1/16/08) – talks about the coyote in the North End and has a great quote about where “the wild” is for wild animals.
• Diagramming the Preamble (1/17/08) in which Mallard Fillmore’s Bathtub teaches a civics lesson by way of English class.  He also reminds us that today is Benjamin  Franklin’s 302nd birthday.

Book Review: Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichom

Pride of Baghdad (2006) by Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichom is a graphic novel based on a true story of four lions escaping the Baghdad Zoo after an American bombing raid. Unfortunately the premise is better than the execution. Mind you, the illustration for this book are gorgeous in their detail, even in the grim and gory parts. In my little experience with graphic novels it seems that more time spent on the art the less the story is fleshed out in an interesting way. That seems to be the case here as the anthropomorphic big cats head out on their adventure into somewhat contrived situations and corny dialog. It’s not as bad as all that, it’s a great story, I just think it could be better.  I don’t want to give things away but the most moving part for  is simply the words imposed over the last two page spreads.

Book Review: Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird

Before reviewing Andrew D. Blechman’s Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird (2006), a book I learned about on the WBUR radio show “Here and Now,” I’d like to relate a few of my own pigeon memories:

• I’ve long been a fan of pigeons and enjoy watching them (but not feeding them) in Boston’s parks. Once in the North End, I saw a bunch of big pigeons figting over a chunk of bread in the Paul Revere Mall. I thought if I tore the bread up into smaller pieces, every pigeon would get an equitable share without fighting. It was a social experiment gone awry. More pigeons arrived out of nowhere and now there were the same number of pigeons fighting for each of the smaller pieces as there were for the original big piece.
• In London’s Trafalgar Square, famed for its pigeons (with a song in Mary Poppins no less), seemed fairly bereft of pigeons. I saw a bird of prey circling the Nelson Monument, so I asked the Heritage Guards what type of bird that is. “It’s an ‘arris ‘awk,” replied on of them. When we asked if the hawk keeps the pigeon population down, he responded “It keeps the pigeon population moving. The lads who come on Saturday morning with shovels keep the pigeon population down.” Grim stuff.
• Nearby in Hyde Park, a father and daughter are feeding the waterfowl in the Serpentine. The father tells the daughter, in a blatant display of anti-pigeon bias, not to give any bread to the pigeons. “Nasty ol’ pigeon,” says the girl as she drives away the innocent rock dove.
• Meanwhile in Piazza San Marco, the famed pigeons are still an attraction. One of them dive-bombed me within minutes of disembarking. Tourists feed the birds and pose for photos with the pigeons on their arms and heads. According to Rick Steves, the vendors sell a birdseed with pigeon birth control drugs mixed in. While the pigeons are an attraction in Piazza San Marco, John Berendt writes in The City of Falling Angels that they are actively discouraged in the rest of Venice. After reading this book and learning about pigeon behavior, this sounds like Venetian officials are trying to have their cake and eat it too, an impossible task.
• Who can forget the pigeons hatched and raised on our porch in Somerville? Unfortunately for my former landlord, I’ve learned that due to the homing instinct of pigeons, that porch will forever be home for those two young pigeons.

This is a lovely book about pigeons. The subtitle refers to how pigeons are much beloved in certain niches while despised as “rats with wings” by the great majority of city dwellers. In fact, pigeon-hatred is a relatively recent phenomenon, and Blechman hypothesizes that people don’t so much hate pigeons as they hate large numbers of pigeons and specifically pigeon droppings. Blechman explores several aspects of pigeon-loving and pigeon-hating society and dispels some myths. For example, pigeons are not a significant health risk for carrying and spreading disease, as the anti-pigeon front would have us believe. Here are some things I learned:

• the lives of pigeon-racing enthusiasts, especially Orlando of the Borough Park Homing Pigeon Club in Brooklyn who prepares his birds for the Main Event. This race sees pigeons shipped to far away places like West Virginia where they are released to race back to their coops.
• heroic pigeons such as Cher Ami who rescued the Lost Batallion in the Argonne Forest despite being wounded himself, G.I. Joe who saved the lives of British soldiers in Italy in WWII and was honored in the Pigeon Hall of Fame, and pigeons who worked for the CIA.
• The National Pigeon Association Grand National where fancy pigeons are displayed and judged (and sold), a major event for pigeon fanciers akin to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. This includes a Parlor Roller competition, birds that bizarrely roll across the ground (as opposed to roller pigeons that do mid-air somersaults, also a strange and non-beneficial behavior). Here’s a video of roller pigeons in action:
• Charles Darwin’s fascination with the study of pigeons which was central to The Origin of Species.
• Live pigeon shoots throughout history, including the controversial Labor Day event in Hegins, PA which became a target of animal rights activists.
• Dave Roth who lives in a house full of pigeons in Arizona and founded the Urban Wildlife Society and has influenced communities toward more compassionate and effective bird control methods. Other organizations such as PiCAS have established humane methods of reducing pigeon populations in cities my reducing public feeding and setting up lofts for the pigeons throughout the city.
• The extinction of the passenger pigeon by over-hunting, with the last pigeon Martha expiring in the Cincinnati Zoo. “It’s the only instance in history when the moment of a species extinction is known: September 1, 1914, at about one P.M. (p. 118).”
• Pigeon People, a New York-based listserv that acts as a rock dove rescue league. Blechman also meets an underground pigeon protection network called Bird Operations Busted that prevents the netting of birds for pigeon shoots.
• Heavyweight fighter Mike Tyson is a devoted pigeon fancier, although Blechman is unable to get an interview with Tyson.
• Squab are also considered tasty to eat.
• Paccom Films about pigeons.  I kind of want to get these DVD’s now.

This is a great book for pigeon lovers, and perhaps even better to recommend to pigeon haters. I think the noble pigeon is all the more my favorite.

An Owl in the Arboretum

Susan, Peter and I took a walk in the Arnold Arboretum today, cut short by the rain. On our way back to Forest Hills, we saw a large whoosh of brown feathers fly low right over the path. It was a large owl of some sort and it was being pursued by a bunch of crows. We caught up with it down the path where it settled in the branch of a tree and looked pretty calm. Perhaps it realized that it is much bigger than the crows. It stayed still long enough for me to get one quick, blurry photo.

I shared the photo with our friend Toby who is a birder and she identified it as a Barred Owl:

They tend to like densely wooded and swampy areas, but every winter one or two of them show up in downtown Boston … They feed mostly on rodents, so downtown Boston offers rich pickings.

Even though a Barred Owl does not present a threat to crows, they’ll chase it anyway. Any kind of raptor will set them off, and Great Horned Owls (which live in the same types of habitat) are a danger.

We’re having a problem with mice in our kitchen so perhaps we should invite the Barred Owl to stop by.

This concludes the ornithological lesson for today.

Book Review: Clara’s Grand Tour by Glynis Ridley

Clara’s Grand Tour (2006) by Glynis Ridley is quite simply the delightful tale of a rhinoceros and her travels in Europe in the Eighteenth-Century. I learned about Clara on my trip to the Getty Center in Los Angeles where her portrait was the centerpiece of an exhibit of paintings by Jean-Baptiste Oudry.

Clara was a young Indian rhinoceros purchased in 1741 by Dutch sea captain Douwemout Van der Meer who then transported her to Europe. For the next 17 years, Clara and Van der Meer traveled across Europe, often in a specially designed wagon, and occasionally on a barge along the River Rhine. I don’t know if the pun would work in Dutch, but Ridley makes no mention of Van der Meer advertising her as a Rhine-oceros on these occasions.

At any rate, Clara was the first live rhinoceros in Europe for centuries and she attracted crowds wherever she traveled including royalty, philosophes, and artists. Ridley credits Van der Meers advance notice posters as the first multi-national advertising campaign. Similarly, Clara created a cottage industry in memorabilia from commemorative medals to high-class decorative arts in her image. Paris and the court of Louis XV were swept up in rhinomania with Clara inspiring fashions and fads. The king himself though balked at the cost Van der Meer asked for purchase, so Clara did not get to retire in the menagerie at Versailles.

Clara died on tour in London with the location of her remains now unknown, and Van der Meer faded from the written record. During her time, she helped redefine the image of rhinoceros for Europeans familiar with myth and scripture regarding unicorns and Behemoths. Her gentle nature contradicted that legend that rhinoceros and elephants are mortal enemies who will fight to the death. Similarly, Clara captured in art provided the first real image of the rhinoceros to a society reliant for centuries on Albrecht Dürer’s image of a rhinoceros in armor. On a total tangent, I love how things in my life totally overlap so that while I was reading this book this image appeared in my Bloglines in this post on Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog (where it’s used for an analogy about social networking tools).

I enjoyed this book despite the fact that Ridley writes in a dry academic style. Her constant hedging on what she has reasonable proof to be accurate is distracting. Similarly, she constantly refers to images of which only a few are included in the book, and they are packed in the mid-section of the book not with the text that describes them. Still, how could you not like a book about a rhinoceros traveling across Europe, especially with details like her love for oranges and tobacco smoke?

Book Review: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The World Without Us ( 2007) by Alan Weisman is a book length exploration of what the earth would be like without human beings. Long story short, a whole lot better off. Weisman investigates the question by recreating what the world was like without humans, what has happened since our evolution and spread, vignettes of places that humans have abandoned for one reason or another, and theorizing what would happen to the world should we vanish. Weisman puts forward unlikely scenarios of how our species could vanish: a human-only virus, alien abduction, or the rapture. In all likelihood there is nothing that could wipe out the human race will leaving the rest of the world untouched. And since some of Weisman’s world without us scenarios demonstrate the unholy terror that will be unleashed by the things we’ve created without us there to manage them, perhaps it will be better if we stick around and try to figure out how to fix things up.

Here’s a quick summary of scenarios of Earth without her most invasive species:

• Białowieża Puszcza forest in Poland and Belarus, the only old-growth forest remainig of what once stretched across Europe. Here animals like bison may still thrive if the border fence that prevents their breeding is removed.
• Destroying a home is easy. Just cut an eighteen inch hole in the roof and then stand back.
• A vision of New York City without us begins with the subway tunnels flooding. The freeze/thaw cycle breaks up roads and concrete and makes foundations crumble. Ailanthus trees take root everywhere. Fires break out and spread unchallenged. Expansion joints on bridges get clogged and the bridges collapse. Central Park will revert to marshland. Bronze statues and stone buildings will last the longest of human artifacts.
• The western hemisphere once had a great number of megafauna such as the giant sloth. Weisman believes that overhunting by prehistoric peoples brought their end. As evidence he points out that only on Africa where animals and humans evolved together are there still large mammals afoot.
• In Africa today, grazing animals are unable to migrate freely and thus overgraze land which turns it to desert. Parks surrounded by agriculture create two competing environments that don’t work together well. The plague of AIDS is starting to erase the human population and changing age-old settlement patterns.
• Seaside hotels on Cyprus remain abandoned, overgrown, and crumbling since the war in 1974 between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The Green Line, a no man’s zone between the two warring sides preserves remains of once-human habitats.
• The sturdy remains of the underground city in Cappadocia, Turkey may be a long-lasting remnant of past (and future?) human habitation in a world without us.
• Plastics do not biodegrade and may end up outlasting our species by millennia. They break down into smaller particles where they will continue to be a hazard to creatures and plants of the sea. Worse, today in the North Pacific Gyre is today a floating trash dump of plastics run off from land and carried to these doldroms where the trash accumulates.
• The expansive “city” of petroleum refineries and chemical plants covering hundreds of square miles between Houston and Gavelston in Texas. This is one of those places that without human intervention is something of a time bomb that would explode and may never be cleaned up by natural process.
• The world without farms. Rothamsted in England is a place where research in agriculture has been conducted since the mid-1800′s. This includes the Broadbalk and Geescroft Wildernesses where land has been allowed to simply revert to nature. Another place where the woods are regenerating is New England!
  • “Unlike almost anywhere else on Earth, New England’s temperate forest is increasing, and now far exceeds what it was when the United States was founded in 1776. Within 50 years of U.S. independence, the Erie Canal was dug across New York State and the Ohio Territory opened — an area whose shorter winters and loamier soils lured away struggling Yankee farmers. Thousands more didn’t bother to return to the soil after the Civil War, but headed instead into factories and mills powered by New England’s rivers — or headed west. As the forests of the Midwest began to come down, the forests of New England began coming back.” – p. 147
• The fate of ancient and modern wonders of the world. 6 of the 7 ancient wonders are already gone with the pyramid at Khufu rapidly eroding. The Chunnel and the Panama Canal are equally doomed with human care, but Mount Rushmore will prevail.
• The Korean demilitarized zone, like the Cypriot Green Line, is a place devoid of human presence where nature has rushed in to fill the void. Unfortunately, human encroachment on each side of the DMZ has prevented it from becoming the protected space some hope it to become.
• Birds coexist with humans although many species have been wiped out by us as well (the dodo, the passenger pigeon, et al). Without us they would still collide with radio-transmission towers and power lines which kill millions of birds each year, at least until those things collapsed from inattention. The common housecat also slaughters songbirds for sport and without human care would continue to do so in places where cats would never have existed naturally.
• Nuclear power plants and nuclear waste dumps. You don’t really need to read this book to imagine what would happen to them in a world absent humans. Oddly, Chernobyl shows an example of wildlife returning to the land abandoned by people after the disaster there. Still, it’s hard to believe the world would recover so easily if all 400+ nuclear power plants melted down simultaneously and contaminated the earth.
• The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement are people who’ve sworn to not reproduce and simply wish to convince everyone to voluntarily let our species die out. Reading their arguments they actually seem to have a point and are at least convincingly not crackpots.

Oddly it seems that humanity’s greatest achievements (skyscrapers, etc.) are the least permanent, while trash, plastic, and oil — the detritus of civilization — are the most permanent.
There’s a lot more in this book which makes for a thoughtful, sometimes depressing, but always fascinating read.

Skunk!

Last night while Susan and I were bringing in shopping from the car and taking out the trash and recycling we saw a skunk skulking about the streets. It seemed upset because it keep making unhappy chirping noises. We gave it wide birth because you don’t want to get too close to an agitated skunk. I also noticed that the skunk had a pronounced limp.

This morning I figured this nocturnal creature had gone off somewhere to catch some z’s, but as I walked to the bus stop there it was skipping down the sidewalk…

…and heading straight to the nearby elementary school!

I figure a gimpy skunk and school children would make a great story. Perhaps a horror film:

Skunks in a School

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Or similarly, a Boston Herald headline:

STINK SCHOOL

Rampaging Rodent Terrorizes Somerville Kids

Democrat Pols Could Have Stopped Skunk Menace But Chose Not To

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But really I think it would work best as a heartwarming children’s book:

Skippy the Skunk

One day a sad skunk limps into school, and after an initial fright, becomes the school mascot as children rally together to save him from pest control. Then Skippy bites one of the children teaching them all a valuable lesson about rabies and why wild animals should remain wild.

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I do feel a little bit guilty though. Should I have warned someone at the school that an unhappy skunk was in the neighborhood?

Trip to Southern California: San Diego

I returned to Southern California after a 27-year absence in order to add to my collection of ballparks and see the New York Mets play in San Diego and Los Angeles. I visited Los Angeles when I was six years old. This was my first visit to San Diego.

View all of my photographs from Southern California.

I flew to San Diego by way of Cincinnati. The last leg of the flight passed over desert, including Death Valley. Being a Northeastern boy this is the closest I’ve ever been to a desert. As we approached Lindbergh Field, the plane flew low over the city of San Diego. I caught the swift 992 bus downtown and dropped my bags at my hotel, 500 West.

After grabbing a sandwich, I boarded the Blue Line trolley to the border: Tijuana. I was surprised that the city and the suburbs extended all the way to Mexico. In fact near San Ysidro I saw dense urban settlement on the distant mountains only to realize later that it was Tijuana itself. Both countries are built up to the border with no frontier between them.

Crossing the border is rather humorous as all about are signs that say things like “Left Lane for Mexico,” “U Turn For US,” and “To Mexico and Parking Garage.” I followed that last sign where a long line of pedestrians entered a fugly building of corduroy concrete that straddles the highway crossing the border. I walked up a long twisty ramp, crossed the highway, came down a twisted ramp on the other side, passed through a revolving gate and voila! I was in Mexico. On the southern side of the border I was greeted with a concrete plaza surrounded by concrete buildings that resembled parking structures. These buildings contained shops selling prescription drugs without prescriptions and lots of tourist tchotchkes. More carts staffed by aggressive vendors and cute children lined a ramp up to the bridge crossing the dry Rio Tijuana. At last I made it to the main tourist zone in the Avenida Revolución. Here were more aggressive vendors for me to shake off, Mexican zebras (sad donkeys with stripes painted on them), shady bars and “erotic dance” locales. It was all overwhelming. Even when I walked over to the less tawdry shopping district for the locals, I felt so crowded that I could not even stop to look at my map.

My guidebook recommended visiting the more upscale Zona Río so after getting my bearings I walked over that way by way of a desolate warehouse and auto parts district. At least I was away from the crowds. Avenida Paseo de los Héroes is relatively more elegant than La Revo but it is merely a palm tree lined boulevard of strip malls and office buildings similar to many a suburb in Southern California. Unlike the tourist area, the locals were business people chatting on the sidewalks during lunch break. Tijuana is actually one of the wealthiest cities in Mexico which is all relative based on the decrepitude and poverty I’d seen overall.

 

I found myself evaluating why had I come to Tijuana in the first place. Basically I wanted the novelty of crossing the border by foot and then wandering around to see what’s here. With that in mind I chilled out a bit. Finding nothing of interest open on Avenida Paseo de los Héroes I decided to return to the La Revo area to visit the cathedral and then return across the border. Having had time to acclimate I found it much more entertaining to wander around on the second visit. I stopped in the busy cathedral — a dark, cool, glistening place on a hot day — and then bought some postcards. Before crossing the Rio Tijuana I stopped at a sidewalk bar and had a bottle of Pacifico beer. I was liking Tijuana a little better. Perhaps if I came with my buddies when I was 19. Of course I didn’t have buddies like that when I was 19.

Crossing the highway on the Mexican side I felt rather smug looking at all the cars backed up at the border crossing (where they had a last chance to buy tchotchkes from vendors on the side of the road). Then I saw the line of pedestrians waiting to get into the United States. For the busiest border crossing in the world the twenty minute wait wasn’t so bad.

I took the trolley back to San Diego, checked into my hotel, and grabbed supper and beer at Karl Strauss Brewing Company (which feels like the Boston Beer Works with different signs). Then I walked to Petco Park. The ballpark is located right in the revitalized downtown area and has nice local touches such as sand-colored walls and palm trees. Most famously the Western Metal Supply Co. building is incorporated into the stadium and from the exterior it looks like just another old building fronting the street. Beyond center field there are bleachers with a beach for kids to play at and even beyond that a grassy knoll where people can watch the game or look at the stars. There’s also a wiffle-ball park where a tired looking Padres employee pitches and dozens of children attempt to field. It’s a very walkable park with open concourses and for the first night I spent a lot of time walking around seeing the game from different angles (and no one stopped me nor made me feel like I shouldn’t be there). You may read about the game itself in my Mets week in review post.

Post-game I walked through the Gaslamp Quarter which seems to be mostly restaurants and hotels with the bars being on the chi-chi side. With nowhere else to wet my whistle I settled on Ghiradelli’s for a chocolate malt.

Day 2 in San Diego began with a trip to the San Diego Zoo. I love zoos and I’ve heard great things about San Diego since I was a kid. The staff tried to sell me the full package which includes the bus tour around the park but I preferred to walk so I purchased the cheaper admission. Inside it seemed at first that many of the roads were dedicated solely to the double-decker safari buses and like Southern California cities, pedestrians were marginalized to a narrow sidewalk. Then I discovered the central part of the zoo where there are paths going up hills, down ravines, and over exhibits on skywalks in a way that was not only great to see the animals but just a wonderful landscaping design overall. Best yet no motor vehicles could get into this part of the zoo at all. I saw many animals I’d never seen before at other zoos such as koalas, pandas, and meerkats and so old favorites like polar bears, gorillas (and boyillas), and big snakes. I really enjoyed this zoo.

Continuing through Balboa Park I was sorely tempted to visit the San Diego Museum of Art and San Diego Model Railroad Museum but I decided I needed to keep my time and money budgeted. I did pay a quick visit to the Botanical Building and the small art collection in the Timken Museum. Then I walked across the western part of the park where planes fly very low en roue to the airport. I continued my walk into Little Italy where I visited the small Our Lady of the Rosary church and admired the paintings on the ceiling. Then I had supper at Filippi’s Pizza Grotto where chianti bottles hang from the rafters. The food was good and the chianti divine.

After working out at the YMCA attached to my hotel, I attended another Mets-Padres game at Petco Park, walked down a different street of the Gaslamp District, and visited the Princess Pub in Little Italy that sadly had no cask-conditioned ales on tap. The next morning I had plans to stroll along the waterfront, exercise the Y, update my blog at the web cafe, and eat breakfast. I fell back to sleep and the maid service awoke me at 9 am so I only had time for the latter eating at the Grand Central Cafe in the hotel. Then I went to the spiff mission style Santa Fe Depot and bought my Amtrak Pacific Surfliner ticket for Los Angeles. The clean, smooth double-decker train hugged the coast for much of the trip and made stops at places like San Juan de Capistrano and Angels Stadium in Anaheim. Had I known this ahead of time (and the Angels were playing at home this week) I would have incorporated those two stops into my itinerary. Good to know for future reference that they are accessible for the car-free traveler.

19th-Century Weapon Found in Whale

Did you ever have a pain in the neck that just wouldn’t go away?  Some poor bowhead whale was lanced with a weapon by some whalers 115-130 years ago and has carried a fragment in its neck ever since.  Well at least until last week where this whale got caught in another whale hunt off the coast of Alaska and didn’t get away this time.

Who knew whales lived for so long?  Marine biologists probably, but not me.

I first hear the story on NPR and the read about on BBC News via Found History.  It’s a cool story so I needed to share it here.

All of this is a good excuse to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Squab the Deck

Birds seem to love our house. On two occasions we were forced to evict starlings nesting in our dryer vent (whom we affectionately named Scratchy and Scratchy II), birds of all feather like to rest on our bathroom window to watch us shower, and pigeons gently coo us to sleep.

After a long stretch of cold, wet weather we once again ventured out on our porch only to discover another nest, this one belonging to a pigeon. The mother pigeon was rather skittish and probably for good reason not trusting of the human trying to fix his bike so near her eggs. We named her Didi after a rather skittish person we know. Any time one of us went out on the porch, Didi would run frantically down to the edge looking over her shoulder the whole time and then fly off to the power lines.

A few days later the eggs hatched, producing two cute in a very ugly way pigeon squab. Didi is a bit less skittish now that she has her young to protect, although she has to venture off more often in search of food. I expect the wilds of Somerville are good places to hunt down the pigeons natural prey: bread crumbs and stale french fries. Being good hosts we try to keep an eye on the baby pigeons while Didi is away. Needless to say, our landlord doesn’t like this at all.

I searched online for information about baby pigeons (such as the plural of squab) and learned that seeing baby pigeons is considered a rare feat. I also found a site that tells how a baby pigeon grows. Apparently our two chicks will spend about four weeks total in the nest while mother Didi stuffs them with gourmet meals. After that time the squab will look more like pigeons and start to fend for themselves a bit more. I also read that the male pigeon is involved in caring for the young, but I’ve only observed one pigeon tending this nest (like I can tell them apart).

Didi guards her eggs.

The freshly hatched squab chicks.

One week later, one week uglier. Sorry Didi, I know they’re the apple of your eye.

More on the pigeons as they develop.