Picture Unperfect: Bringing up Baby - Saving a Woodpigeon Chick (Part 1)

If there was one thing in life we never expected to do it was to hand rear a Woodpigeon chick.

One Saturday in late September 2012 we were just finishing up painting the front of the house. A quiet public footpath runs past us into the village. There are a lot of large conifer trees in the garden that grow next to the path. We were admiring out handiwork when I saw a young girl coming towards us, cradling something in her hands. That something turned out to be a very young chick that she had found on the footpath. She handed it over to us and now we were responsible for a recently chick.

We were surprised that birds would have young this late in the year when the weather had turned cold.

Terry identified it straight away as a Woodpigeon (to me with it it’s overly large flat beak it looked duck like). It was shivering and squeaking and we agonised over what to do with it. It had obviously fallen out of its nest but the young girl had now gone and we had no idea where precisely on the path she did find it. If we left it on the path for the mother to find the cold and the local cats would kill it very quickly.We couldn't in good conscience leave it to fend for itself.

I named it Walter (after the Forbidden Planet actor, Walter Pidgeon), or Wally for short. We had no idea what sex it was.

Walter the Pigeon

When we were kids both of us had a little experience of raising young birds that had been found out of the nest so we thought it Wally would be pretty straight forward. Drop food into its mouth, give it bread soaked in, milk and water from a dropper, straight forward.

Some quick Googling told us that keeping Wally alive wasn't going to be as straight forward as we thought. Turns out, Woodpigeons are not like most birds.

Most bird young are fed by their parents literally regurgitating food into the mouths of their young. Woodpigeon young do the exact opposite, they stick their heads into the parent’s mouth and drink a substance called crop milk (secreted from the lining of the adult bird’s crop). You cannot give a young chick cow’s milk, or give it water (it gets that from the crop milk).

This proved to be problematic at seven o’clock on a Saturday when all of the shops are shut.

We had to improvise a feeding system until we could find something better. Terry used an old chocolate pieces container which we filled with a paste made of ground up Weetabix and water. We covered it with the part of an old latex glove fixed with an elastic bag and cut a slit in the latex. We then had to grab Wally’s neck and guide his beak into the slot in the latex and pour the paste down his throat.

Terry's improvised feeding system

We placed him in a small tub with kitchen roll for bedding and kept him close to the radiator. I was convinced when we got up the next morning that Wally would be a goner.

Sunday morning, and he was chirping to be fed.

This gave us the chance to hit the local garden centre which also sold chickens and ducks, so we were able to get pigeon corn for Wally, grind it up and make a thick paste with water. We also bought a baby bottle, removed the teat and replaced it with the part of a thick rubber glove.

You have to be careful that their crop (where they store the food for digestion) that they do not have too much food inside as this can cause problems. We would stroke Wally’s neck to if it was full, after a couple of feeds you get your eye in on what it should be like.
Feeding is also a messy business.

We ended up cleaning a lot of the pigeon corn paste off Wally as he tended to stick most of his head in through the “mouth” of the bottle. Initially we feed him on our knee with a towel to keep him warm (and stop him from fowling our clothes) and as the days progressed the sight of the blue bottle coming out of the cupboard would send him into a spate of wing flapping and chirping.

It was amazing to see such a helpless creature start to grow in a matter of days. Wally started to put on weight quickly and his skin began to vanish as his first feathers started to come through.