Pigeon Rescue

I feed birds in my balcony. Pigeons and sparrows are my guests most of the time. The smart crows are stopping by if I leave a large piece of food for them.

This pigeon used to come for few weeks when I realized that it has tangled by a fishing line on both of its legs. This made it walk hardly. It is a big disadvantage when racing for the food with other pigeons.

So I decided to rescue it from this type of life.

 

How I managed to become friends with it

As it cannot walk fast it was hard to race to take the breadcrumbs before the other pigeons. So I decided to gain its trust and become friend with it in order to make a smooth rescue operation.

At the first stage of my becoming friends scenario, I put the breadcrumbs next to me. I was letting only that pigeon to approach for the food. After some time – a few days maybe – I gained its trust and it started to come near fearless to get the food. So we were friends then.

It was time for us to be closer friends. In this stage, I hold the food in my hand without moving while he was eating. As we were friends there was no risk at all taking the food from my hand.

The trust was established. It was time for the last move which is to cut the fishing line connecting both legs so that it can walk freely. I had 2 options to do this. I would either grab it and do the rescue operation giving it trauma or I would cut the net by taking its attention to somewhere else while I was cutting the line.

I chose the second option. After a few trials in a few days, I managed to cut the line and rescued the pigeon.

Below you can watch a very short video showing one of my attempts to cut the line. The video is short because at that time I didn’t know I was going to write about it and show the video.