Good grief! How many doves are there? Late this afternoon I counted seventeen in the feeding-place. They are multiplying... At their present rate of increase we shall have to move out of the forest within a year. ;-)
The sixteenth one that appeared the other day but was too shy to come down to the ground turned out not to be an adult, as it she had seemed at a distance to be, because she has since been down a couple of times and as the pink ceres of a chick. She is very timid; she trembles with fear, and hardly knows how to eat, so she is noticeably thin. I expect she will copy the others and gain in confidence.
I do not think she was one of the seventeen, so all together there may be eighteen.
This morning there were thirteen doves gobbling bits of cheese from my hands, and the blackbird chick came very close to one hand, which suggests that she is a female, although her singing suggests the opposite, but till proved otherwise I shall think of her as female. I tried to her get it get her to eat out of that hand, because she was only centimetres from it, but she is not yet that confident, and the scrum of doves would have been daunting. However it she is now happy to hop about the porch feeding close to my feet, if there are no doves competing with her. She gives them competition too; she clacks her beak at them if they try to take 'her' food.
The sixteenth one that appeared the other day but was too shy to come down to the ground turned out not to be an adult, as it she had seemed at a distance to be, because she has since been down a couple of times and as the pink ceres of a chick. She is very timid; she trembles with fear, and hardly knows how to eat, so she is noticeably thin. I expect she will copy the others and gain in confidence.
I do not think she was one of the seventeen, so all together there may be eighteen.
This morning there were thirteen doves gobbling bits of cheese from my hands, and the blackbird chick came very close to one hand, which suggests that she is a female, although her singing suggests the opposite, but till proved otherwise I shall think of her as female. I tried to her get it get her to eat out of that hand, because she was only centimetres from it, but she is not yet that confident, and the scrum of doves would have been daunting. However it she is now happy to hop about the porch feeding close to my feet, if there are no doves competing with her. She gives them competition too; she clacks her beak at them if they try to take 'her' food.