We have boids. At the back of the house, we have gentle tweety boids, who start up at about 6am. A useful addition to the alarm clock on a working morning, and not so loud I can’t sleep through their early morning canoodlings at weekends.
But at the side of the house we have pigeon boids. And these are not good boids. The house is a three story Victorian, and the pigeons sit on the side chimney. A couple of months after we bought the house we’re sitting there quietly one Sunday morning.
“WOOOOOOOOOOO!” “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Like a bad pub singer taunting an unwilling audience, those pigeon boids had found out that the chimney was an acoustic dream. And they sang, constantly and seldom melodiously, for hours at a time. When it got too much, we’d stick our heads in the hearth and WOOOOOOO right back at them. It seemed to work for a couple of hours at a time.
Several years later. The "WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"s have slipped into our subconscious, like a nagging headache. We start doing up the house. And we put a new fireplace, complete with damper, in the living room.
It’s Sunday afternoon. Suddenly there’s the sound of squabbling between bird and cat outside. There are pigeon feathers by the side of the car. And while we don’t exactly like our pigeons, we’re hoping this one’s ok. Until there’s a sudden scrabbling noise, and bits of twig start falling into the hearth. There’s a scraping noise, a thud, and a clang as the damper falls into place. Followed by a startled and indignant “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”.
So now we have a pigeon. A very vocal pigeon. Trapped behind and holding shut the damper that is its only route to freedom. If we push the damper back, we crush the pigeon. The pigeon can’t move anywhere else to let us push the damper back. And the pigeon isn’t quiet: it WOOOOOOOs, it scratches, it does a jig of indignation. We sit on the sofa, clad in guilt. It takes two days before we work out how to lift the damper out and free the boid.
Bless Darwin (as he is now known). Since his spectacular freefall and subsequent release (to the care of Mrs Darwin, who was singularly unamused to see him back, and gave him a very vocal dressing down, probably referring to the nights he had spent in the nest of another), the pigeons now assemble in the trees, on the garden wall, and occasionally on the back lawn. But never, to our amazement (since we never thought of pigeons as being quick learners) on our chimney.
