The pigeon on windowsill arrived just after dawn during the spring holidays. I was 11, already up with toast and the TV on, when a soft peck at the glass drew my eyes to a bird pressed close to the pane. Blue-gray with two dark wing bars and a navy-tipped tail, it looked striking against the morning sky. At first I admired it, until I realized it was not staring into the room, it was staring at me.
Where we lived, high on the top floor of a quiet house in Somerset, pigeons were rare enough to feel special. Our view was almost all sky, so I welcomed any sighting. Those clear mornings, I watched its odd habits through the sash windows, the way it shuffled along the sill, the doll-dark eyes, the fixed head tilt as if it knew exactly where it was. We did not think of pigeons as pests or threats.
The pigeon on windowsill and an unlikely bond
I paused the TV and slid the window up a little. The pigeon stayed put. Still holding my toast, I broke off a corner and set it on the sill. He snapped it up. “Hello, Percy,” I said. He looked straight back at me.
The next morning Percy returned before breakfast. I opened the window again and handed out toast. This time he hopped from the outer sill to the inner one. I cannot say if I was shocked or delighted, maybe both. We held eye contact longer than seemed normal.
Then I heard my mother in the corridor. I tried to shoo him out, but Percy dodged away to the log basket. After a few frantic flaps around the room, he flew back outside. My mother called from the kitchen. When I turned to leave, the pigeon was still there, still staring, crust in his beak but not eating. I realized I had made a mistake.
The following morning he showed up again. I kept the window closed. He stayed anyway, pecking the glass before finally lifting off. The next morning, the same. And again after that. After a few days I stopped going into the living room, but he kept coming.
For the rest of the week, my thoughts drifted to the pigeon. Small tasks grew difficult. I would start conversations and lose the thread, everything circling back to Percy. Determined to face it, I crept down the landing past the bathroom and my sister’s window to the living room door. I lowered myself to my knees and peeked around the frame, believing if I kept low he would not see me. I was wrong.
Two weeks later, my sister and I had reshaped our lives. No TV. Sometimes the curtains stayed drawn or the shutters closed. We would commando-crawl to the kitchen to avoid being seen. The flat felt dark and tomb-like. Only after Easter, as school loomed again, did we think we had finally won. Percy was gone.
We soon returned to morning toast and TV. Years passed. Then one day another pigeon settled on the sill. I was older, but it did not matter. I shut my eyes and waited for it to fly away.
