Well, it looks as though we’ll be keeping little Eggbert the dove, but I made John agree that we’d reached our upper limit for birdom right now. And another thing – we’re 80% sure that Eggbert is a SHE, so she’s now Egberta. The cool thing here is that the name Egbert/Egberta is Old English for “shining sword”! So yes, it’s a weird name, but with a cool meaning, so we can keep it. Also because we can’t stop calling her Eggie, so I’m glad to have a good excuse to keep the name.
And here’s a recentish photo of Egberta – not a full grown dove yet, but sort of the equivalent of a teenager.
Since taking this picture we’ve moved her to a new, larger cage with nice perches and plenty of room to stretch her wings. And speaking of stretching her wings, yesterday I was adjusting something in her cage and she flew right out the large door, around the room, and landed on the sunny windowsill! Luckily, we’d been getting her used to us handling her (or maybe she was just really shocked at her own daring!), so she stayed still while I picked her up in both hands and put her back in the cage.
She’s cooler than any human teenager I’ve ever seen!