When we had our first bird incident yesterday–as I write this in Washington Dulles airport as we are back in the United States–I did not think that there was quite enough content to write an entire blog entry about it. To be sure, having an encounter with a wild bird indoors is not an extremely common experience, but it takes more than one experience to have a pattern, and since we had more than one experience of birds over the course of our travels yesterday, I thought it would be worth discussing. So here goes.

When we got up early in the morning to head off from our hotel, we exited our room to find a gray dove or pigeon flapping about on our floor of the hotel near the elevators. We did not know exactly how the bird had managed to find its way to this place, as there are no windows close by. Our best guess was that someone had left their balcony open, the bird had flown into a room–there are only four of them on the floor–and then that the bird had flown into corridor and then towards the elevators after the door to the room had been opened mistakenly. We tried to calm down the bird, as it seemed highly anxious, but were unable to. We did inform the lobby staff that there was a bird that needed to be guided outside and hopefully it was gone in a humane and gentle fashion.

That might have been the end of it, except we got to the airport and found a small seed-gathering sort of bird in the airport in Cape Town on the floor while we were dealing with the logistics of what ended up being too long of a journey to see the actual cape of Cape Town. As this particular part of the hotel was near to the exits, it seems likely that some small bird had flown into the airport when someone was entering or leaving the taxi area and simply found the airport to be a comfortable place to eat, even if there aren’t really any seeds there. I must admit I find the airport to be a comfortable place to eat, as we were on our way to spend hours parked at a plug at a restaurant near the international check-in area, which proved to be a convenient place to camp for us, even if the internet in the airport was rather slow.

Birds in general, despite their skills at large-scale navigation and their ability to fly many thousands of miles with their small brains to locate very specific places in their travels, do not always thrive when it comes to small-scale navigation. It is not hard to find videos of birds flying into windows repeatedly, even to the extent to hurting themselves, but while the bird at the airport did not appear to be lost, the bird in the hotel was definitely not where he wanted to be. Fortunately, for the birds at least, both of the birds that we encountered were among friends who were curious about their ways and not inclined to harm them at all. Not all birds are so fortunate.