# Is it usual for Parents to both Leave Babies (to Forage?)



## Howard Nye (Oct 14, 2009)

Hi all,

Is it usual for feral pigeon parents to both leave babies alone on the nest when they go out to forage some time after the babies are 12 days old? I've been checking in on a feral baby (or pair of babies; I can't quite tell) in a nest, who probably hatched at least 12 days ago (when I found the egg shell - I'd seen the parents sitting on the nest for at least a week prior to that). So the baby / babies are probably at the very least 12 days old but could be several days older than that. I just want to make sure that the baby / babies hasn't / haven't been abandoned. 

(I've been trying to manage this family of feral pigeons in a parking garage at my University. We have permission for a managed cote project. Unfortunately we put the cote on the roof, and the pigeons chose to use a nest on the floor under it, which nest they seem to have used continuously for several years, and given its placement in the back-centre of the garage it seems to give them ideal shelter from the elements and predators - there are hawks in the vicinity. Our initial cote placement on the roof did not given them anything like this kind of shelter from the elements or predators. We're planning to move our cote down to the 8th floor so the pigeon family can hopefully have their next clutch in that, at which point we intend to catch the eggs as soon as they're laid and replace them with false ones. This is part of the deal we struck with buildings and grounds: they'd stop trapping the pigeons if we did a managed cote system with them).

Thanks so much,
Howard


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## Marina B (May 5, 2011)

From about 2 weeks old, the parents will leave the babies alone during the day. They have enough feathers by then to keep themselves warm and don't need to be fed so often. So no need for alarm.


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## Friend John (Jun 10, 2018)

Hi there,

I'm very new to this whole pigeon thing myself, but I've just had a couple of pigeons raising a squab which is around 15 days old right now. According to what I see, the older the squab gets, the parents leave for more extended periods. They do come back though, at least in my case, and the female still spends the entire night with the squab. The male takes some time off in the mornings and afternoons but he stays relatively close from what I can tell. At times he'd leave the squab in the nest and will just stand around very close by on the bars outside my window. I really don't know much about pigeons but what you're describing seems normal to me from my own short experience.


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