Crafty and grafty pigeons

All our efforts to keep the pigeons at bay had come to naught, yet we did not really hate them. They looked beautiful with their lovely blue grey feathers. The pink colour rings around their eyes looked like round frames of a lady’s reading glasses, its rosy hue matched the colour of their delicate claws with which they daintily gripped our balcony railing. They did all they could to keep us pleased. The male of the pair often cooed and danced. Even though his cooing was a bit guttural, his dancing around his beloved trying to impress her with his artistry made us so sympathetic to his cause that even his singing started sounding sweet. What a loving couple they made. We were burdened with a heavy sense of guilt when we first thought of shooing them away but we were helpless.

They didn’t know how to avoid open defecation. No swachcha (clean) toilets for them. They were pretty good at building a home for themselves, but the software Specialist who uploaded nestmaking in their pea-sized brains probably found their storage too small to fill in details of a toilet attached to their nest. Their ignorance in this field made us feel like their victims notwithstanding our admiration for their looks and musical and choreographic talents. And then there was the issue of littering of our little balcony with sundry building material they used for homemaking. We loved sitting in our balcony to see the rising sun and soak the morning calm. Their presence against a backdrop of a rising sun and the gentle morning breeze filled us with a sense of harmony with nature. But the litter and the poop they dropped were worse than the proverbial fly in the ointment.

We had to get rid of them. But it was easier said than done. We tried placing a row of tough plastic spikes on our balcony awnings that gave it the appearance of an angry porcupine. But our unwanted guests mastered the art of perching on the spikes like a hathayogi reclining on a bed of nails. Somebody suggested we enclose our balcony with glass sheets but the very thought evoked claustrophobia. We then went for net curtains sealed with Velcro on the balcony frame. But the die-hard infiltrators managed to dig small slits in the velcroed net and came in yet again.

We were now fully determined to keep them out. But how determined our unwanted guests were to adopt us? We discovered when we found two cute looking eggs in the flowerpot placed in a corner of our balcony. Apparently, God had endowed them with the craft of nest weaving and they had picked up the art of graft from human beings. Their bribe melted the lady of the house. We shall now wait till the eggs are hatched and the chicks fly out before we try yet new ways to keep our crafty and grafty intruders at bay.