Wednesday, January 09, 2008

The One That Got Away

When Morgan goes out hunting it usually means the end of a life for some poor being so on Sunday when he brought his prey in our garden again it seemed no different. On second glance though the victim wasn't a tiny dormouse or inexperienced bird, it was a pigeon. Almost as big as him, for once Morgan gave up a fight as soon as he saw the eyes looking at him in horror from the house. This is very strange for feisty Morgan as he is not one for giving up but he did, and unusually walked in the house and went to lie down on the chair and went to sleep. In our house through bitter experience we have a drill we carry out whenever we discover a living casualty within our boundaries and this time was no different; get both Morgan and Scooby in, lock the cat flap, go out and see the injuries, put something over them to protect it whilst it recovers from shock however more often than not with Morgan's victims the shock or injures killed them within minutes. Not this pigeon though. His (I'll call it a him for the sake of argument) chest and beak had blood on them but he was breathing (always a good sign). This pigeon must have been a fighter because two hours later he was in the same place and still breathing. How long can you look at a shocked, injured bird in front of your eyes and do nothing about it? As he had managed to fight this long we concluded he had a better chance than most and so we decided to take him to the RSPCA as in our mind it was the only chance that he would live. So there we drove with the casualty in a cardboard box hoping against hope that the car journey wouldn’t distress him more (though I figured that there wasn’t anything more distressing than being in between Morgan’s claws) and there we left him no more at the mercy of nature, rather that of compassion.
We wondered about what fate had befallen him for the next few days as it was made plain that they would do everything to ensure his recovery as long as his wings wasn’t broken in which case he would be shown dignity in putting him to sleep. This made sense as, after all the whole point of a pigeon is that they can fly, it’s the purpose of a bird’s life. On Wednesday we phoned them. Holding our breath we waited for the outcome. I hardly believed it true when we were told that the pigeon had recovered and been released.

So there we have it, one of the very few beings that have survived Morgan’s claws and teeth. I wonder where he is now. Is he telling all his ‘friends’ about his trauma and miraculous escape, or perhaps though not forgetting it, accepting it as part of his daily struggle to survive. In any case, I am glad that he is here to tell the story if he chooses.