WOOD PIGEON

I don't know if this is the male or the female, but we've had this nest of wood pigeons that we've been taking care of for the last few weeks. Our gardener noticed it was there after she'd been cutting the hedge down, and I've learned quite a lot about wood pigeons. They're pretty useless at making nests: they just lay a few twigs down and think, "Well, that'll do," and lay their eggs, usually a pair.

As far as we can tell, there is only one baby, and it's about 4 weeks old now, so it will be getting ready to leave the nest. Certainly, the adult pigeons are going away for hours at a time now, whereas last week the baby birds were never left alone. The picture was taken with a Hasselblad X2D II 100C + 135 mm with a 1x7 teleconverter. There was a time when we were convinced there were two, and possibly there were, but we've not seen any predators around at all. Our dogs haven't had anything mysterious in their guts.

The adult birds are not bothered by me at all until I tried to feed one of them some seeds, and it immediately flew away. That taught me not to get that close. There is plenty of seed for them on the bird table to keep my dogs away as much as possible, and there is a very large bowl of water for it to drink from or bathe in.

As is often the case when using this camera I didn't do any editing.