Doves

 The 2012 Robin's Nest

After we cleaned the balcony porch, we planted colorful pansies in our large Mexican urn; even with some cold nights, they would endure, and they waved in the windy, sunny days like the samurai nobori battle flags in the films of Kurosawa.

We planned what to put into the planters which will hang on the porch railings, and one morning we woke up and discovered a robin had built her nest in the middle of the pansies. After a brief period of silence, during which we individually calculated the moral toll of nest-tossing now versus the unspeakable act of egg-tossing later versus living with the robins, I asked how long it had taken three years ago when we had a similar situation.
It takes about a month total for nest building, laying, hatching, and kid robins first flight; maybe a little longer. So we accepted exile from our porch for that time, took the planting boxes outside the garage - placing them outside in the morning and inside at night.

I always knew that cuckoo birds were criminals, laying eggs in the nests of others, but this year our researches into birds disclosed that doves just outright steal nests, and hunker  down on their wide, wide beams and squat.

So we kept an eye out for doves. There were a bunch hanging around. Doves are good for nothing, it seems, but stealing nests and defecating.
In fact, for doves, defecation is sort of like standing on a street corner smoking a cigarette, or flipping a lucky coin, or hanging around at the barber shop and chewing the fat.
They are like,
"Say, what's cooking, good looking?....**splatt!**",
and "Top of the...**!plop!**...morning to ya!",
and  "Ah dunno... whaddya... **splatter!** sploosh!***... wanna do? Like steal a nest?"

 Dopey Dove

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