Living in the very centre of a city, I am quite accustomed to pigeons being all over the place and usually making annoying sounds etc. Lately I noticed that I always had the same couple of pigeons on my ledge before my windows. There is a flower tub (without any flowers; they shrivelled long ago) on this ledge and they seemed to be very preoccupied with this tub.
After a while I got curious and had a look into the tub to see what was so special about it. To my surprise I found one pigeon egg in it! So apparently they have chosen my ledge and tub as their breeding ground.
Pigeons itself aren't very interesting animals you may say, and I would agree mostly. They make the utmost annoying sounds and have an obnoxious way of walking (with their head moving forward on each step like a woodpecker). However, having two pigeons breed just four meters next to where I am sitting right now is quite interesting.
Of course, in the beginning I tried all the funny experiments that spring to mind immediately, like putting an additional chicken egg into the tub and see how they would react. Apparently it's not so easy to irritate them as they continued breeding without much fuss.
I looked up some things about pigeons in the dictionary and found out that they are monogamous. According to the entry, both the female and the male pigeon engage in the breeding process although I think I've only seen the female one in the past two days. It also says that there are always two eggs in the nest. As there was only one in the tub I was rather sceptical as to how successful their breeding would eventually be.
But yesterday I had a look again and now there are indeed two eggs. From now on it should take around two weeks for their offspring to slip from the eggs.
