Conversation Entre Les Tourterelles

Madame Tourterelle: It was terrible.

Monsieur Tourterelle: Yes, you told me. I believe you.

Madame Tourterelle: But you weren’t there. You can’t imagine how sad it was. As if you were watching one of our children—but fifty times as heavy, with no wings—try to fly from the nest a few days after he was hatched.

Monsieur Tourterelle: That I can’t imagine. We guard them and feed them day and night until they’re strong enough to fly on their own.

Madame Tourterelle: Humans really don’t have wings.

Monsieur Tourterelle: That’s obvious.

Madame Tourterelle: But this is the first time I felt it viscerally.

Monsieur Tourterelle: Was he fully fledged?

Madame T: Oh yes. You knew him. The one who put out morsels for us on his windowsill.

Monsieur T.: He never had any others of his kind visiting him.

Madame T.: This is what I don’t understand. In Asia, humans are rarely alone. Or that’s what my great-great grandmother told me.

Monsieur T.: I heard the same thing from my great-grandfather, who lived in Key West. He said humans knocked on the doors of new neighbors, and welcomed them, invited them over.

Madame T.: The woman who lived below him was a world traveler, a wise, warm-hearted soul. I heard her say the other day—

Monsieur T.: —Oh dovey, don’t tell me you’re learning human speech now!?

Madame T.: What else do I have to do all night, sitting on those eggs? She leaves her windows open. Friends visit. I heard her telling one of them about the fall. She said she’d wanted to welcome him to the building when he moved in. But you don’t do that in France. She’d heard from his landlord that he was French, but not from Paris, an engineer in his 30s, shy. That was all she knew.

Monsieur T.: Did she see him fall?

Madame T.: Are you asking me a sensationalistic question?

Monsieur T.: Non, ma chère, I’m just wondering if he got confused and thought he could fly.

Madame T.: He jumped! The woman was so shaken, thinking if only this custom of reserve between neighbors wasn’t so strong here, she would have welcomed him, been a friend.

Monsieur T.: Because he was lonely.

Madame T.: Of course he was. It’s easy for us tourterelles. We pair up, have two kids every few months, help each other feed and raise them, and stay together for life.

Monsieur T.: Life seems to be more complicated for humans.

Madame T.: Coo COO coo. That’s the truth. Did you find us another home?

Monsieur T.: I did. It’s in the fifth arrondissement, quite beautiful, among some pink geraniums.

Madame T.: You’re wonderful. Is it safe?

Monsieur T.: These particular humans never open their windows.

Madame T.: Is it soft?

Monsieur T.: A bit too twiggy for my taste.

Madame T.: I’ll fluff it up with some feathers.

Monsieur T: There IS one thing… A human on the next floor up seems like a spy or something. He has this thing set up that looks like a miniature Eiffel Tower holding a big round eye that’s watching the nest. Sometimes two of them take turns looking through that eye.

Madame T.: They’re probably studying us for hints on how to live. How to be calm, productive and peaceful. Content with whatever life brings your way.

Monsieur T.: As long as it’s not a hawk.

Madame T.: Oui, mon amour, anything but that. Shall we help them out?

Monsieur T.: Coo COO coo!

Welcome, New Tenants

The apartment across the courtyard--the twig-lined fixer-upper in the windowbox--is occupied once again, as of yesterday.  An industrious young couple has moved in, and looks to be setting up housekeeping among the geraniums.

Paris Play readers will recall that the apartment's builders and first occupants, another pair of Eurasian Collared Doves, successfully fledged two young, and the whole family departed just last month. That saga began here, continued here, and ended here.  Those posts included a lot of background on this bird species, which you can read there, so we won't be redundant.

The new couple did some serious renovating, including passing straw beak-to-beak in very close quarters:

The new couple is definitely not the old couple (you'll recall mom had a scissor beak), but we will entertain speculation that it might be the kids (let's say they were brother and sister) come back to raise a new generation. We know enough about Pharaonic royalty, if not about birds, to entertain that notion. Or maybe it's just one of the old kids, with a mate, met on the romantic summer streets of Paris.

And here's a Paris Play first:  VIDEO of one half of the new couple doing some serious circle-dance renovating. The Paris Play Nikons have HD video capture technology, which we've been saving for the right occasion, so here's our one-minute video debut:

 

Baby Bird Update

They get so BIG.

The first picture is mom and the kids yesterday (Tuesday).  We know it's mom, because you'll note that she has a deformity, a scissor beak, that doesn't stop her from being able to feed the chicks.  But we wonder how she feeds HERSELF.

And below, the ten-day olds, posing this morning (Wednesday) with dad.  You'd be that big that fast, too, if your parents kept force-feeding you a high-protein shake.

 

Birth Announcement

A pair of our neighborhood Eurasian Collared Doves, who spent some days a couple of weeks ago building a stick nest among the red geraniums in a neighbor's window box, successfully hatched their clutch of two eggs on Monday, and are now raising two chicks.

Monday Unveiling

We can't tell the difference between the parents with our naked (or even binocular-clad) eyes, but birding sites say that the male and female work shifts (dad in the day, mom at night) sitting on the babies to keep them warm, and feeding them with the usual partially-digested regurgitated baby bird gruel that parents make.  (Let's not go there.)

Tuesday it rained, but regurgitation must go on

Since these pictures were taken in the daytime, this is Dad and the youngsters. The helpless, down-covered babies take from fifteen to eighteen days to become fledglings (with developed feathers, and with wing muscles that are capable of flight). We believe that our human neighbors never open their courtyard windows, which emboldened the Eurasians. The geraniums do well with the oblique sunlight (this view is down to a fourth-floor window box in a six-story building), and with the intermittent summer rains.

According to Wikipedia, the Eurasians are originally from subtropical Asia, but successfully spread during the 20th Century to inhabit a range from the Arctic Circle in Norway, to the Urals in Russia, and south into Morocco and Egypt. Introduced into the Bahamas in 1970, when it is believed that some pet Eurasians escaped their cages, the species has dispersed primarily into the Gulf Coast, but can now be found as far as Alaska, as far west as California, and as far south as Vera Cruz. Some birding sources speculate that it is filling the ecological niche of the now-extinct Passenger Pigeon. It does not appear to compete with either the Mourning Dove, or with another "invasive" (non-native) species, the Rock Pigeon.

Like swans, the Eurasians are said to be loyal mates.

As recent immigrants ourselves, we welcome our new neighbors, and appreciate their echoing, resonant coo-cooooo-cooing in the courtyard outside our bedroom window. Even Marley, the cat, listens at the window for their music, perhaps more attentively than we.

This big on Tuesday

This much bigger on Wednesday