On Tuesday Richard wrote that we decided not to take Minnie home with us since Elmo was getting very jealous and territorial and attacking everything and everyone in his jealous anger. It wasn’t an outcome we had hoped for.

Elmo was chasing and trying to attack Minnie, who would fly onto Richard, which enraged Elmo even more (since Richard is his!). Then Elmo would take it out on Georgie – even attacking her on the floor which is something he never used to do! Poor pigeons! I have to admit we seemed to have messed things up with this!

And it wasn’t fair on Georgie either to have another pigeon in the flat since she cannot see properly. Minnie seemed to be quite interested in Georgie’s unusual looking eyes and would try to peck at them gently. Obviously Georgie didn’t like this and since Minnie can fly, George couldn’t really escape from her advances.

So after only having Minnie living with us for two weekends and evenings in one of the weeks, we made the decision to find her a new home. We have to think of what is best for our current pigeons.

During the week when Minnie was in the aviary at my workplace she was getting a lot of attention from the temporary ferals in the aviary next to her. The males were all cooing and dancing to her and I could see that she was interested in them too. Minnie was also interested in Elmo when he made his courting noises to Richard; she would fan out her tail and run across the sofa to him, thinking that Elmo was cooing to her. After seeing all this I knew that although Minnie loves to be with people, she would also love to have a pigeon partner (just like Dora).

The broken wing female

I knew of someone who is looking for female pigeons for her aviary to pair up with some of her mateless male pigeons, and so yesterday Richard and I collected Minnie and another female pigeon (that has a broken wing and therefore cannot be released) from my work and took them to their new home.

We put Minnie and the female into the aviary and the male pigeons there immediately took an interest in them. There was an initial uncertainty but both the broken wing female and Minnie didn’t seem distressed by the attentions of the male pigeons. We would have stayed longer to see who Minnie took a liking to but the heavens opened up and we had to run back to the car before we got soaking wet.

I’ll keep you updated on how Minnie is settling in and who she’s paired up with!

Minnie hanging onto the bars, unsure about the big male next to her.