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The Un-Comfort Zone II by Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. I Rescued a Flying Rat (It’s natural to be motivated by compassion.) Shortly after buying my first house, I discovered my next- door neighbor tended to overreact to any dilemma. His name was Joe, and I started thinking of him as “Overkill Joe”, and later simply “Joverkill”. For example, Joverkill found he had squirrels living in his attic. It was no surprise to me; he had more squirrels in his yard than anyone else on the street. He had two lovely nut trees growing at either end of his house. In his front yard was a beautiful oak tree. A perfect shade tree, if I ever did see one; and in the fall it was laden with acorns. In his backyard was a huge pecan tree I was particularly fond of because it would drop about a half-bushel of pecans on my side of the fence every fall. Both trees were very old. With two heavily producing nut trees on either end of his house, the squirrels natural ly wanted a highway between them - and his roof was right there. Underneath the roof was a nice warm place for storing nuts and making babies. Sadly, Joverkill’s solution was not the sensible one of cutting off the squirrels’ entrance ramp by cutting back the branches which were close to his house, but to cut the trees down instead. I came home from work, and was aghast to see blue sky and sunshine where there had been only foliage before. Once he had gotten rid of the squirrels, pigeons moved in. It would seem the next logical step would be to fill in or patch the holes the animals were using to enter his house, but this never seemed to occur to Joe. All the houses in our neigh- borhood were close together and separated only by a driveway. One afternoon as I pulled up in my car, I noticed Joverkill had ripped out all the soffit from underneath the eaves on the side of his house alongside my driveway. Getting out of my car, I looked up at the long gaping hole which ran the length of his house, and said to Joe who was standing nearby, “Are you remodeling?” “Nope, just getting the pigeon nests out of my house.” It was then I saw the baby pigeon on the ground. It was bigger than a newborn and covered with downy feathers. Usually the parents will feed a baby bird on the ground when it has fallen out of the nest, but I feared one of the neighborhood cats might have a penchant for squab, so I picked it up and carried it into the house. I found an empty box and made a nest out of a hand towel. I then made a few phone calls (this was in the days before Google) until I found someone experienced in rescuing birds. She told me they didn’t take in pigeons, but explained to me how I could feed it baby cereal from an eyedropper. When it got larger, I started feeding it a more normal pigeon diet of pep- peroni pizza, french fries, and hamburgers with pickles, mustard, and ketchup. It was about this time I started let- ting it out of the box in the hopes of get- ting it prepared to go back into the wild, or at least the inner city. For lack of a better name (or perhaps creative inter- est), I called it Pidgy. It would follow me wherever I went; running as fast as its little legs would go. I tried teaching it to fly by tossing it up in the air over the thick carpet grass of my backyard, but it would only flutter to the ground. Some days I would run as fast as I could to see how well it could keep up with me. Then one day as I did this, it broke into flight and landed in my hair. I quickly learned to hold out a finger as a perch for it to land on. Now it was flying, I wanted it to remem- ber it was a pigeon. I built a roost on a pole with the opening facing my bird feeder about ten feet away. 302-684-3197 FAX: 302-384-0643 142 Broadkill Rd. • Milton, DE 19968 www.atlantic-screen.com email: atlantic@ce.net Manufacturers of Slotted & Perforated Pipe ranging from ½” to 24” diameter Atlantic Screen & Mfg., Inc. • Well Rehab. Products • Manholes • Bentonite • Filter Sock • Inline Chemical Mixers • Sampling Bailers • Clear PVC Pipe • Locking Caps Wilson cont’d on page 30. 25 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® DECEMBER 2017