This was a great idea for a thread!
I’ve had my share of wildlife encounters (though not nearly enough for me
), but one of the most memorable happened in August 2004. My family was visiting the twin cities, and we were taking one last trip to the Mall of America before heading home. We were in the parking ramp, and had barely gotten out of our car, when we saw a smallish, scruffy-looking pigeon nearby. Upon closer inspection, we found that it was a juvenile bird, still sparsely covered with strands of down, and apparently either too young or too weak to fly, as it only ran when we approached, and eventually hid under another parked car. When we were finished at the mall and returned to the car, we found that the pigeon was still there. We managed to catch it, and I assumed the job of holding onto it while my dad went to obtain a box and some food for it.
The pigeon seemed to calm down and become accustomed to us very quickly; after several minutes of holding it, I let it simply perch on my arm (which subsequently led to the bird literally walking all over me
), and it never attempted to escape. We put the pigeon in a cardboard box lined with paper towels (along with some water and mixed seeds for food), and brought it home with us (a three-hour car trip, not counting the rest stop we took). Along the way, I named the bird “Shemp”, for the high-pitched peeping sounds he made (which vaguely reminded me of the sounds made by Shemp Howard of “The Three Stooges”).
Once we got home, I found a bigger box to hold Shemp, and kept him in my room for the night (we never found out whether Shemp was male or female, but thought of him as a he). The next morning, we called around to try to find someone licensed to care for a wild bird. Eventually we made contact with a woman who regularly kept and rehabilitated pigeons, gulls, and other birds, and arranged to bring Shemp to her the following day. We found out from her that Shemp was healthy, but underfed, and that he probably would have starved to death had we left him in that parking ramp. A few weeks later, we met with her again to release a now mature, fully fledged, and well-fed Shemp into a wooded area she had selected.
Technically, pigeons are feral descendants of domestic rock doves (
Columba livia), but they still count as wildlife, right?
