There was a knock at the door! I opened it… And was confrounted with a confused, chaotic cloud of frantic, fierce flapping!

When I recovered my wits, and the real estate agent at the door had taken several startled steps back, this little dude was sitting on the floor inside the door.

The agent was pushing an open house on the “white bunker” house at the bottom of the hill. That’s my term for it, of course, their Zillow listing has a ton of much flowery language. But the short version is 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, only 1,940 square feet (!!!), and a look that I find tragically unappealing, and they’re asking for

$1.7MM??!!

Even by our local standards, that’s freaking ridiculous by a factor of two or more!!

No, thanks, go away. Now, back to the bird.

I didn’t try to touch it, but I leaned over to get a better picture and the little beastie went into panicked fluttering and flailing mode again, right up into my face and out the door. It tried to land on the flagpole, which was way to slippery to hold onto, but it managed to keep its balance as it slid down to the bottom.

Now clearly seen as a mourning dove fledgeling. The coloration is all wrong for a mourning dove, but normal for a fledgeling who is likely to get out of the nest and get stuck on the ground where it would be an easy meal. Our subject wasn’t too thrilled with the photos, so once again it remembered that it was capable (sort of) of flight, and made it all the way across the street, where it discovered that it didn’t yet know how to land in a tree and perch. After something of a crashy sort of coming to a halt (any landing’s a good one if you can walk away from it!) I left it alone.

Until later, when I heard it in the nest up under the roof by the front door.

Remember how the finches always build their nests on our back porch? The mourning doves have done something similar in the front. But way back behind some tall bushes, and up about two feet higher than I can reach without going to get a stepladder. Which I didn’t want to take the time to do.

Once again, the neighbors are watching as I’m on tip-toes, stretching up as high as I can, trying desperately to not fall face first into the garden, holding onto my phone with one hand, blindly pointing it off in the direction of the nest, shooting pictures at random and hoping for the best..

This was the best I got, at first.

Later when I went out again I could see that the fledgeling was still there, so I tried a different tact and did something equally ill-advised in terms of my personal safety (ER docs & paramedics: “You broke all of those bones doing exactly WHAT??!“) but which let me actually look (just a little) at what I was taking pictures of. Success!

Meanwhile, the bird’s had a rough first day of flying. It’s probably coming down off of one hell of an adrenaline rush (do birds have adrenaline or is that a mammal thing?) and it would have really preferred being left alone.

So I did!