France in Focus

This morning a visitor on my doormat

I prefer the doves to pigeons, there's something so delicate about them ! I haven't seen them here, just the Collared doves.

What a little beauty!

Blaze wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2026 2:37 pm I prefer the doves to pigeons, there's something so delicate about them ! I haven't seen them here, just the Collared doves.

We get a fair few Collared doves rummaging in the grass below our suspended bird feeders.
They usually arrive in pairs & I read that this is normal as they pair for life.
One day there was an almighty crash on one of our kitchen windows & on investigation I found mortally wounded dove on the terrace.
From that day on, whenever we see a singleton we wonder if that's the survivor of a pair & hope it'll find a new mate.

The OH had installed an Android app "Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab". This afternoon we listened to a song of a Goldfinch.

L Austin France wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2026 6:37 pm One day there was an almighty crash on one of our kitchen windows & on investigation I found mortally wounded dove on the terrace.
From that day on, whenever we see a singleton we wonder if that's the survivor of a pair & hope it'll find a new mate.

That's very sad. At our last place we found a pair of dead blackbirds who had flown straight into one of the windows. It was unusual as it was a smallish window and there wasn't a window on the other side of the room.

We once stayed on a little CL outside Hereford it was in a wood, the owners had a bungalow with a patio door, they used to watch the odd pigeon fly into it only for it to be grabbed by the resident Buzzard, we did actually see this happen, home food delivery!

We hear turtle doves but rarely see them

We have patio doors, and occasionally get the odd bird hit it, often they are just stunned, so we pop them into a cardboard box in the dark until we hear some movement, aparently by doing this they are less likely to panic when they come around, then of course release them outside.