The Wing-Friends and Other Books

In Blogger's slideshows images are greatly reduced, so lose much of their impact. And captions added to them in Picasa Albums vanish, so the images shown above are: the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, Earth, Earth with New Zealand circled, New Zealand, Auckland & the Hauraki Gulf, Waiheke Island, some native NZ forest, a Fantail and chicks, various doves, etc.

(If you want to see the first ten images in their original size, they are in a posting made on the 24th of November 2011.)

My book The Wing-Friends is an imaginative tale of a small brave boy, a magical adventure, a magnificent Pegasus and the wonderful Kingdom of the Pegasi. It has been given very good reviews, and virtually every reader on Goodreads has so far awarded it five stars. It is available here. Some of my other writings are available as e-books, such as The Lower Deck, which is an over-the-top take on Waiheke happenings--sort of.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

A TRUSTING WILD DOVE

Latish this afternoon I went outside, and found half a dozen doves on or near my porch. One was the female that I have previously called Light-Feathered Feet, because she has only a few small feathers high on her feet. Some doves have no feathers anywhere on their feet, some have a few small ones, some a few medium ones, some, like BigFeet (aka BigFeet1) and BigFeet2, have so many and such long ones that their feet are almost invisible.

I must think of a shorter version of her name. Lightfeet. That is poetic enough for such a beautiful bird. And she is lighter in weight than others, especially F1 and M1, who are bigger and noticeably heavier. After a while she flew up to my right hand to eat the ground grain that I kept offering her, and when she had finished she went to my left hand to eat that offering too.

Then to my delight she again showed that she is not on my hands just for food, because she settled down on my hand to work through her feathers, and to roost, even relaxing so much that she stood on one foot for much of the time. As I stood there, with her contentedly being her dovish self only a few centimetres from my face I wondered how long she would stay. About three-quarters of an hour was the answer, then she flew quietly away round the corner of the building to do something else, perhaps to have a drink from the small jars of water that I have provided for them.

A wild, young bird, only weeks old, trusting me that much. How wonderful! Would that all of nature had no reason to distrust us, because we were not busy wrecking it!