However ignoring the birdhouse totally (and rather rudely) one day, a lady pigeon laid an egg in our Tulsi planter.
I was pretty outraged on behalf of the unborn offspring but then I thought maybe pigeons just didn’t make nests (at least it was better than laying your egg in someone Else’s nest), or maybe this one was exceptionally lazy. Or, thought I (when in a charitable, non-judgemental mum-to-mum frame of mind) maybe she was a single mum – which would explain a lot, including the absence of any kind of a father figure hovering around the ‘nest’.
She would periodically fly away presumably in search of food, leaving her egg totally exposed to crows and mynahs. That might have been forgivable, but she also took off each time we went even close to the balcony, heartlessly deserting her egg. While such shoddy mothering annoyed me no end she seemed pretty satisfied with it. So much so that the next day she went and laid another egg!!
The eggs would have long gone had I not taken over her mothering duties. It was I who tiptoed into the balcony, I who told the maid to stop watering the poor Tulsi, I who left piles of grains for her and I who shooed away myriad predators including two excited, clueless but very curious children and their bunch of bird crazy friends. One of them wanted to stroke the bird, another wanted to ‘just touch’ the egg and yet another wanted to check if she would eat from his hand. Whew!
All I didn’t do was sit on those darned eggs to hatch them. No sir! That easiest bit was all madame ‘real mum’ did. For over three weeks she sat on them when the fancy took her, while we waited, looking out each day for the new arrivals.
