A writer has described how one pigeon turned a childhood spring into weeks of drawn curtains and floor-level movement around her family’s home.
Writing in the Guardian, Morwenna Ferrier said the bird first landed on her windowsill shortly after dawn during the spring holidays, when she was 11 years old and eating toast while watching television. It pecked at the glass, she recounted, and she turned to find it pressed up against the pane.
She called the bird beautiful, noting two dark wing bars and a navy-tipped tail, and said she was immediately taken with it. Only later, she wrote, did she understand that it was not simply looking inside — it was looking directly at her.
Ferrier observed that pigeons were not especially common in Somerset, and that the family, living on the top floor of a house in a quiet village, had come to value sightings of them. She watched the bird’s rituals through the sash windows, and said the household regarded pigeons neither as pests nor as threats.
After pausing the television, she slowly eased the sash window open to see what would happen. The pigeon did not move. Still holding her toast, she broke off a corner and tossed it onto the sill. He picked it up with his beak, she said, and she named him Percy.
The next morning he flew down just before breakfast. Again she opened the window and gave him toast, but this time he hopped off the outside sill and onto the inside one, she wrote. She recalled the eye contact lasting longer than seemed normal, before her mother’s approach along the corridor prompted her to try to shoo him out. The pigeon dodged her, hopped onto the log basket, flapped around the room and flew back outside. Turning back, she saw him still holding the crust without eating it, and realised she had made a terrible mistake.
He appeared again the following morning; this time she did not open the window. He remained where he was, his outline reflected solid and motionless on the screen, before pecking at the glass and eventually flying off, she said. The pattern repeated over the next few days, and after a while she stopped going into the living room — but he kept coming.
For the rest of that week, she wrote, her mind kept drifting towards the pigeon, small tasks felt impossible and she lost the thread of conversations halfway through. Deciding she had to confront the situation, she walked slowly down the landing and got onto her knees at the living room doorway to peer around the frame, reasoning that a low position would keep her hidden. She was wrong, she said.
Two weeks later, she and her sister had upended their routines. They stopped watching television, sometimes drew the curtains or closed the shutters, and commando-crawled into the kitchen to stay unseen. The flat, she wrote, became dark and tomb-like. It was only as Easter passed and they began preparing for school again that they realised Percy was no longer there.
Before long, morning television and toast returned. Then one day, several years later, a pigeon came to rest on the windowsill. She was older by then, she wrote, but it made no difference: she shut her eyes and waited for it to fly away.
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