Over the past three weeks I have been quietly taking photos to tell you a little photo story about herbs and doves today. It all started with us planting herbs on our deck (you can find the post here). We put the pot in the corner on the rail and just kept watering it and soon after had our first basil harvest for pesto.
One morning I grabbed the watering-can, walked over to the herbs and noticed that a dove was sitting in the middle of the pot. Well, I thought, as soon as I get close enough it will fly away. But – no chance, it just sat there looking at me. Which I thought very odd. Maybe it is hurt? The next second though, when the water came close to the dove, it flew away. So, I kept watering, brushing and smelling the basil and… oops, what is that? A nest – right under the basil, herbs and doves. And in it was a little white egg. Oh oh – now we were going to have a baby.
Naturally I did some research on the internet and the majority seemed to be of the opinion that it were better to remove the nest and shoo off the dove in future, because they would come back year after year and potentially make lots of dirt and noise. Well, I talked to David and we agreed that we could not do that. However, we also decided that we would go our normal routine and keep on watering and harvesting the herbs no matter what. And we did. For the most part when we watered one of the doves would sit in the nest and eye us warily while the water flowed around the nest. Every now and then something would spook it and we could take another peek at the nest. And found a second egg in it! Once I was lucky and got both parents together in the nest.
It takes supposedly 19 days for doves’s eggs to hatch. So we waited, watered, harvested and checked patiently. Sometime last week I noticed that now it was not only mother/father dove in the nest, but some small blackish form lurking from underneath it. The babies were born! Yeah! Pretty ugly to tell the truth. Very naked, black with yellowish spots that, I assumed, were to grow into feathers. Which was confirmed just a couple of days later. Now you can really tell that they are feathers. And the big beaks – don’t they look a little mean? But also quite cute! We will see how many more pictures I will get before the babies are too big and fly off. I just hope they will not totally mess up our herbs, since that is what the planter was intended for originally.
Oh, and for everybody wondering about our shower – do not despair the ‘grand finale’ will be on the blog soon.
