Life Is Good

This is Ike. Ike and his brother Spike are baby pigeons I rescued from our masonry heater flue, after they tumbled two stories from the nest in the top of the chimney.
We have had a number of baby pigeon rescues from the same locale, and are debating the best way to remedy the birds' access into the chimney.
While most folks tend to think of pigeons as flying rats, we have come to enjoy keeping track of the small population which makes its' home on our rooftop (and in the rain gutters and the chimney, etc.).
These guys don't seem to have a very good handle on safe nesting practices, and are very stubborn about continuing to lay eggs in the same place regardless of fledgling success (I am amazed that pigeons are so prolific, given their habits....I guess the same could be said for humans). Their nests are....well, if they were houses they would be condemned by the city as unsafe. Loose piles of sticks with nothing holding the mess together aside from a bit of poop. There is one pair which continues to lay eggs in a gutter which hangs right over our doghouse, which turns out to not be a good spot to try one's wings, and there have periodically been eggs rolling off of the roof elsewhere,  from nests built on an angle.
Regardless of ignorance in basic structural engineering, pigeons seem to be diligent caretakers otherwise. The babies we've pulled from the flue (some nine or ten, last count) have all been found by their parents in our front yard and cared for on the ground until maturity. There is a little cave of sorts underneath a large yucca which provides a relatively cat-safe place to hang out in between feedings, and most of the little squirts have found it instinctively.

     Here,  I am trying to encourage Ike to head for the safehouse, but he had become so comfortable in my hands that I didn't worry him enough to scoot away. Eventually he found his brother, and they lived comfortably under the spines of the cactus until they finally learned to fly.

Life is hard, and there are often difficulties which seem insurmountable. Not all of us are equipped with enough common sense to make it through the world without lots of stupid mistakes, errors in judgment and plain old carelessness. Crap happens that we are not prepared for, and each of us has a different way of dealing with it. However we get there, if we can make it through with a minimal amount of damage to the world around us, then life is good.