The homing pigeon that refuses to go home (Czech Republic)

Vláda found a pigeon sitting on the Hutĕ village green one day, apparently injured, with a bald patch in the neck area.  It was a young bird, he could tell, and had a ring tag, so it must be a homing pigeon.  Vláda put it in a coop up in his loft, which is warm, fed it some grain and left it to recover.  It did, after a couple of days.

That was a fortnight ago.  Since then, the bird has been following Vláda around, obviously associating him with food, and is refusing to go home.  Or it’s too young and doesn’t know its way home, which is perhaps how it came to be on the village green in the first place.

There’d been two other pigeons found on the village green last year.  One died of exhaustion.  Vláda put up a notice on the internet about the second one, and a week later its owner called from Brno (about 100km away) to say it’d arrived home safely.

(Journal) Update, Monday 150811:  This current pigeon was last seen on Friday morning, 120811, so we assume it’s plucked up the courage and gone home.  Perhaps it’s the food on offer here (i.e., not good enough).  Perhaps it’s the constant presence of Tiapka the cat.  (Tiapka means ‘paws’ in Czech, and she is so named because she has two-toed paws.)  I have suggested to Vláda that he check out Tiapka’s tummy contents but he prefers to think the pigeon’s checked out of Hotel Hutĕ.

(Journal) Update, Wednesday 170811:  Vláda says he’d gone to the trouble of getting hold of the contact number for the pigeon fanciers’ association, to whom he gave the pigeon's ring tag number, and they tracked down the owner.  Vláda then got in touch with the owner, who suggested Vláda drive the bird to a place nearer his house, then release it for it to fly home on its own.  Maybe the bird got wind of this, which is why it suddenly disappeared from Hutĕ—the reason it ran away from home in the first place was it didn't like it there, and now Vláda had actually traced its owner and was going to deliver it home (well, part of the way anyway).  Vláda also said that for the whole of the fortnight in Hutĕ, the bird had never uttered a single sound, but on the morning it disappeared, it sat on the eaves and cooed at Vláda.  We both think it was saying goodbye.