Collared Dove
June 25, 2004
Not a great shot per se, but one with a story attached.
This little guy flew in through the window of the room I was sleeping in at my parent's. In the morning we woke to find it staring at us quietly from the corner. I carefully placed a towel over it and carried it out in to the garden. Realising it was quite timid I took the opportunity to shoot a few photos.
Later on I told my dad what we'd done and that it was still out in the garden. He seemed adamant that it was doomed to death and should kill it. Without it's mum to feed it, it would soon die of starvation or be eaten by something bigger. So, my dad killed and buried it in the garden, much to the dismay of nine year old Quinn.
The irony is that it's a ring-neck dove and that's exactly what my dad did to it. Must be the once chicken-farmer in him that takes pleasure in the need to occassionally kill less than fully-grown birds.
Comments (5):
Sad, but probably best. Having seen a few orphan birds starve to death when I was a child, your dad did the little one a favor.
sicko would you kill an orphan child?
Young birds fledge, thats life and nature and would have stood a much better chance of survival if it hadn't had its neck rung!!
Your dads an idiot, a Collared Dove flew against my window on Monday this week. It broke a wing during its crash into the window and could not fly. Perhaps it was a lucky bird that the strangler or any cats were not arround at the time. I bought the bird in from the garden, observed the broken wing, I then taped the wing to his back with micropore. It is now Friday, the bird is alive and doing well living in a plastic storage container in my front room. In 2 weeks time it will have healed and I will release it back into the wild. So far it has lived 5 days longer than if I had left it to the cats, who would only have killed it for pleasure not for food. Perhaps you can consider that it was a pair of Dove's that left Noahs Ark to find land and assist with the survival of Mankind many years ago.
These birds are getting out of hand, there are to many now and they need to be culled.The bird is a past. he did the right thing by pullin its neck.
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