He is, however, a welcome guest.

It’s pigeon breeding season, at least according to Wikipedia. I have no idea of his species; Wikipedia is somewhat lacking in the pigeon ID department. Beyond a bird with a white head and fantail and non-white plumage, I’d be only guessing.

He is handsome, and he knows it. Parading on the roof above my workroom, he puffs out his chest and struts and coos loudly, although cooing doesn’t quite do his mating call justice. It’s more than a murmur. It’s the pigeon version of a car horn.

He begins courting at first light and works solidly through the day until sundown, after which I guess he retires to whatever passes for a pigeon bachelor pad and tinkers with his Facebeak page. When he disappears in a few weeks, as he surely will, we’ll miss him.

It is not the first time a pigeon has flown into my life.

Years ago, when I was living at Hanging Rock, a homing pigeon made an emergency landing on my verandah during a wild, storm-filled afternoon and took up residence on a window sill. The bird was soaked and, as far as I could tell, exhausted.

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Within a few days she was feeding out of my hand and we were haggling over rent.

For some reason I came to think of the bird as female, so I named her Amelia, for the US aviator who disappeared over the Pacific while trying to circumnavigate the world in 1937.

Like her namesake, my Amelia was lost. But soon she had other, more homing-pigeon-like, ideas.

After gaily redecorating my kitchen window sill over several weeks, she began making a few tentative test flights. Before long she was describing lazy loops around the house, ascending ever higher each time as if trying to get her bearings. The loops grew larger over the ensuing days until one morning she simply kept flying and was gone. I heard later from her owner, whom I had contacted when she first arrived after obtaining his details from the band on her leg, that she arrived safely back in her home coop the following day.

The pigeon who has adopted us this time round is markedly different. He is far from off-course. He is exactly where he wants to be. I am half expecting his mail to be redirected to our address at any moment, possibly via carrier pigeon.

National Bird week October 22-28: The Aussie Backyard Bird Count is an annual event during National Bird Week. Record bird sightings anywhere in Victoria using the “Aussie Bird Count” app or on the Aussie Bird Count website.

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