Our India Baby Pigeons

Pigeons mate for life and rear their broods together, although if one dies the other will take a new mate. Once the simple nest is built, the female lays an egg and then another a day or so later. The incubation period for common pigeons is 17 to 19 days. The female sits on the egg from late afternoon through the night until about 10AM. The male then takes over and does the day shift. Once the eggs hatch, both parents feed the young squabs. The first food is pigeon milk or crop milk, a cheesy substance that appears in the crops of the parents at hatching time and is fed for a week or so. Then the adults start regurgitating partially digested grains for the young. By the time the squabs are ready to fly, about 4 weeks, the father is doing most of the feeding. The squabs are fed for another week to 10 days after they are free-flying.

Secondly, pigeons are parents non pareil. They lay only two eggs at a time, and spoil those babies shamefully. "The parents will feed the babies until they're totally feathered out, by the time they leave the nest, they'll be about the same size as the adults. You know when people eat squab, that's when they take 'em -- when they're nice and plump." Squab, for the culinarily challenged, being baby pigeon.

These birdlets get something called "pigeon milk," and the faint-of-stomach may not wish to explore this paragraph further. Both parents manufacture in their crop, or throat, a rich, fatty "milk" that looks, much like yellow cottage cheese. They ralph this delicacy up and expel it into the throats of their darlings. "You can see this white stuff glowing in the crops of the squabs, "They're just full of it."

After eight or 10 days of this ambrosial diet, the parents begin mixing in solid food and water. "They'll eat heavily, then drink a lot of water to easily chuck up the grain," and offering between these fascinating facts to send me photographs of fancy pigeons. "And did you know pigeons drink like horses? Hens will lift their heads up to swallow. But pigeons put their head down and just take a long draught."

And do the parents flinch at all this work, this cheese-making, this grain-chucking, this drinking-like-a-horse? Of course not. "If all's going along well with the first nest, they'll build another, right near by, and lay the next batch," Heppner says. "They'll take turns sitting on the next set, while the other feeds up the squabs." And they'll do that four to six times a season. So, not only are there baby pigeons, there are baby-pigeon assembly lines.

And when the fledglings do finally leave the nest, their plumage and size are so similar to those of the flock they hang around with that only the practiced pigeonophile would be able to pick out the babies.

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