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.