# Wild baby pigeon died



## Jilly30 (Dec 16, 2013)

Hello, I am new here. I'm an American living in India and for the past 7 months we've had a variety of pigeon couples nesting on our balcony. Our most recent pair had a single egg and we watched the baby grow and fly away. They mated again and laid a pair of eggs this time which recently hatched. 

I was so excited because there are a lot of crows around that usually get to the eggs, but both babies were born! This, afternoon I opened the curtain and saw one parent standing kind of awkwardly on the nest and one baby didn't look normal. Soon enough the parent walked away from the nest to scare off an unwelcome pigeon and it is very clear that one baby is dead. It is just kind of laying across the nest stretched out. The other baby is still alive and moving just fine.

It is winter here right now (by this I mean the temps go from 90s during the day to 60s at night)...so maybe the cold evenings caused it. I'm very sad, but should I do anything about the body? Is the dead baby body just going to stay there in the nest til the insects start eating it??? I don't think I want to see that!

I think the parents know something is wrong because one parent is sitting awkwardly on the nest and the other parent ( who is usally standing guard on the railing) keeps coming over to look at the nest. This is interesting behavior to watch, but I'm worried about the other baby because the one parent on the nest is only sitting partially on the nest.


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## Woodnative (Jul 4, 2010)

How old are the babies now? If I were you I would go ahead and remove the dead baby. If they just hatched out this sometimes occurs...an occasional hatchling will be weak and exhausted from the hatching process. 60 is not cold at all for breeding pigeons. Otherwise it is hared to determine what happened but the parents can not remove it. Your disturbing the nest to remove it will not effect the parents or thier care in any way. If you enjoy them nesting on your balcony....just a thought but you may want to set up a secure box of some sort....open only on one side. Even a deep clay vessel on its side with a wide opening. As long as it stays dry inside......pigeons like to nest in privatespaces like that and it may help curtail the crows a bit. BTW you could even band the babies and/or work on taming them a bit if you wanted too.


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