Today a hawk flew into our picture window in pursuit of a white winged dove. The dove also hit the window and barely survived. I'll know in the morning if he'll live or not. The Cooper's Hawk perched outside for a while on the gnarled branch of an old mesquite tree waiting for us to leave the poor wounded creature so he could devour it. He finally flew off. I have him (the dove) in a box in the shop...he was out in the grass well hidden but it's going to rain tonight and there are critters out there and, well, there's nothing as innocent and gentle as a cooing dove. They look at you with those big doe(?) eyes that seem to plead for help whether they need it or not. You know doves are really pigeons...At least that's their classification. I have raised both doves and pigeons and have found them to be the most noble and clean birds out there. They keep one mate and both parents sit the nest and bring up the young...regurgitating copious amounts of half digested seed meal-mush into waiting and eager little beaks. For a time we had both chickens and pigeons in the same building. The chickens were layers, Aricanas and Buff Orpintons and... the odd Banty to keep things colorful. They typically wouldn't sit their eggs but since we always had a couple of roosters they were fertile -needing only the typical three weeks of broody warmth to hatch them out. We got the idea to put some chicken eggs in the pigeon nests to see what would happen. Faithful and true as the day is long those beautiful, iridescent and monogamous birds incubated and then hatched giant green and brown eggs as if they knew what they were doing. The fun part was to see them try to feed the young chicks who wanted to be pecking and scratching the ground as soon as possible, all the while the clueless surrogates kept trying to barf their little tidbits into the down-turned faces. We just built a new chicken coop and what with the hardscrabble times we've all fallen on, thought it would be good to raise our own food again. I think it pencils out to be about $10 a dozen (eggs) when everything has been tallied. Is that a good deal?
