A Dove in the Studio

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

There are pets, like Chet Baker, and there are wild things, and when you hand-feed a wild thing for weeks and help it learn how to do what it needs to do to survive; when you become its mother, that line blurs. My style of raising birds is labor and time-intensive. It's rooted in my need to know that they're going to be able to make it on their own.

Most people think that when a baby bird "learns to fly," it's ready to be on its own. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The post-fledging period is a critical one. It's when the bird follows its parents around, watching them and learning from them. It's the time when a bird learns what's good to eat and what's inedible. It learns vigilance and wariness and it gets the lay of the land. You make darn sure that bird knows how to pick up all its own food and keep its weight up before you ever let it go. At least I do. I err on the conservative side.

It's hard to impart any of that to a bird when you're a big lumbering grounded human. The first step, for me, is to allow the bird some freedom in the comparatively safe confines of my house. This means you get doo-doo on your laptop now and then. It's all part of the scene.

Hmm. What to blog about?

Blog about meeee. People will like that. I like looking at pictures of me; why wouldn't they?

Like when I met Sara and Kelly. That was awesome. I'm not sure they'd ever held a mourning dove before.

When Phoebe's in the studio, we come up with photo ops together. This was her idea.

It was about at this point that "Olivia" went from "Libby Lou" and straight to "Pweep."

Pweep is what she says when you speak to her. So we figure that's her name. Or maybe it's her word for "people." Or the dove equivalent of "Mama."

Like when she's perched on your 2-terabyte hard drive, which you got so you won't lose all your data when a mourning dove, say, overturns a water jar on your laptop (which she didn't; I'm just giving a what-if)

and you say, "Libby Lou! What are you doing?" and she answers, "Pweep!"

Gotta go! Got dove bidness to attend to.

Ooh, I just love this lil' post, love remembering what it was like having a dove around for a few blessed weeks. Speaking of remembering, my friend Debby Kaspari is moving on with her life. She and Mike may have found a house to buy. They're still dealing with disposing of all the debris from the one the tornado flattened. Because their subdivision was unincorporated, insurance won't cover any of that cost, which could go as high as $20,000. What a drag, to have to pay to haul away the bits of what was once your house.

Dear friend Murr, she of the Baker quilt, who has never met Debby in person, created a T-shirt design so she could help. All proceeds will go to the recovery fund. It's got some nice Murr-created Oklahoma birds on it, and it says "Nest in Peace." There are a million different styles of shirt; scoops and tanks and all kinds of cool ones, so you won't be stuck with a crewneck Fruit o' the Loom. I'm thinkin' nightshirt, myself. You can get yourself a Team Kaspari shirt right here.

Thanks, Murr. You're the bomb.

Zamora Fútbol Club (Venezuela)

Zamora play in the Primera División of the Liga Venezolana, and 18 club league that, like many in South America, splits its games into two seperate compeitions - the Apertura (August to December) and the Clausera (February to June). The winners of each have a play off to decide who is that season's absolute champion. Sadly, Zamora have never taken part in that game.

Formed in 1977, they've spent most of their days in the Segunda División, finally getting promoted to the top level by finishing runners-up in 2006. They play at the chunky multi-purpose sports stadium, the 30,000 capacity Estadio Agustín Tovar, in the city of Barinas, an historic old town in the North West of the country.

The last few years have seen the best results of their history, and despite never having won their league, they've come close enough to merit a place in the Copa Sudamericana - South America's version of the UEFA Cup - in both 2007 and 2009, reaching the preliminary and first rounds respectively.

Their fans go by the nickname of La Furia Llanera, and their fan club band play furiously through every game. you'll also notice that the good old fashioned bogroll plays a big part in watching football in Venezuela - sounds like my kind of place!



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Neftçi Baku (Azerbaijan)

The most successful team in Azerbaijan history, Neftçi Peşəkar Futbol Klubu are a team intrinsically linked with the oil-trade that has made their country one of the richest in the region. Indeed, the Neftçi of their name roughly translates as Oilmen, their club crest pictures an oil rig and their colours refer to the black of the oil that springs so fulgently from their many wells.

Formed in 1937, they had much success in the old Soviet First League, where they had three long spells, finishing as high as third place in 1966. Many of that squad have become national idols in their own lifetimes - much like some other mob from the same year from a little closer to home. Names like Anatoliy Banishevskiy, Kazbek Tuaev, Aleksandr Trophimov and goalkeeper Sergey Kramarenko are spoken of in the coffee bars of Baku with the same reverance as Hurst, Banks, Charlton and Moore are over here.

Since the splitting up of the Soviet Union they have gone on to become one of the major forces in the Azeri Premier League, winning it five times since its inception in 1992. They've also won the Azerbaijan Cup five times and bagged the CIS Cup (for former Soviet states) in 2006. 


The Oilmen currently play in the 30,000 capacity Tofik Bakhramov Stadium, also home to their rivals FK Baku and the Azeri national team. Built in 1951 by German POWs, it was made in the shape of a C - Stalin's initial letter in the cyrillic alphabet. However, it was renamed in 1993 to commemorate the death of a legendary Azeri referee. Could you imagine Wembley becoming the Uriah Rennie Stadium? Actually, that'd be quite funny!



Their main rivalry though is with Khazar Lankaran from the south of the country, in a game so fiercely fought that it's known as the Azerbaijan Derby. So if you ever find yourself around that way and that game is on, do everything you can to get a ticket, because by all accounts it's flipping bonkers!

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TP Mazembe (DR Congo)

Tout Puissant Mazembe - the TP part of their name translating as, rather immodestly, All Powerful - are one of the oldest and most successful club sides in African history. Based in Congo's second city, Lubumbashi, a copper-mining settlement near the border with Zambia, they were formed back in the 1930s by an order of Benedictine monks at the Holy Institute Boniface of Élisabethville, to keep those of their students who didn't want to take up the cloth fit and healthy.

In those early days they went under the name of the Holy Georges, and they soon joined the Royal Federation of the Native Athletic Associations league, where they came third in their first season. They continued on as the Georges until they changes saints and became Holy Paul FC in 1944. A few years later they cut all link with their church-based founders and became the rather quaint sounding FC Englebert, named after their new sponsor, a local tyre brand.

But it wasn't until the sixties that their star began to really shine. In 1966 they won a rare local treble - the National Championship, Katanga Cup and Congo Cup - while it reached the final of the African Cup of Champions between 1967 and 1970, winning the first two years, and becoming the only team to have ever defended the title, until Enyimba International of Nigeria finally equalled their record in 2003 and 2004. 

They won the Cup of Champions again in 2009, going on to play in the FIFA Club World Cup, where despite starting well, they finished sixth.

In total they've won the Congolese national league ten times, the Congo Cup five times, and have qualified for the Cup of Champions, and its successor the CAF Champions League on an admirable 13 occasions.

After their initial spell of success in the sixties and seventies, they spent getting on for two decades in the wilderness, when the Governor of the Katanga Province, Moïse Katumbi Chapwe, took over as club president, changed the name and started pumping money into the team. Indeed, he's recently announced that he's looking to punp ten million dollars into the team next season, and plans to build a new stadium to replace their 35,000 capacity Stade Frederic Kibassa Maliba soon - the first to be solely owned by a Congolese club.



However, The Crows, as their fans call them, made the news most recently for much less pleasant reasons when they were expelled from the West African CECAFA Cup, when their star player, Tresor Mputu Mabi, set about the Ethiopian ref after he had a goal disallowed in a tetchy match against their fellow stripes form Rwanda, APR FC. The match was abandoned and Mazembe sent home in disgrace. It has transpired that Spurs have shown an interest in the Mabi for the Champions League push, so if they do go on and buy him, keep an eye on this talented yet volatile player!

STOP PRESS
TP Mazembe more than made up for their above indiscressions when they became the first African side ever to reach the final of the FIFA Club World Cup - a tournament for the continental champions from across the globe - in the UAE in 2010. They made history when they beat the South American Champs, Brazil's Internacional, 2-0 in the semi-final, before going on to lose 3-0 in the final to that other Inter, from Milan in Italy. Good work fellas!

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Oruro Royal (Bolivia)

Oruro Royal are one of the oldest and best respected clubs in Bolivia. They were formed way back in 1896 when the British-based Bolivian Railway Company Limited began to lay the lines on the Oruro to Uyuni line across one of the most mountainous areas in the country. Much as the missionaries did with religion some years earlier, the Brits brought the hip new sporting trend with them wherever they set foot, and many of the famous clubs in South America were formed by travelling British workers.

The game was instantly picked up and loved by the local workers, and an exhibition match was arranged by the British, close to the Oruro cemetery. The local clergy were up in arms that the new craze was keeping their subjects away from their sermons, but as we were prone to back in those colonial days, we completely ignored them and encouraged the youth of the area to start up their own team.

Four years later a more formal club was founded, when the town's elders realised that this new game was a good way of keeping their young people both fit and off the streets. All through those early days the team was stuffed with Englishmen. But as time went on the locals became so rabid in their fervor for the sport that it soon became a completely local affair.

Fast forward to 1930 and the Royals made up the basis of the Bolivian team that took part in the first ever World Cup in Uruguay. Going into the tournament, Bolivia had yet to win an international match. And drawn in a tough group along with Brasil and Yugoslavia, they would leave the tournament without improving that record. But the boys of Oruro still made their mark on the world of football history.

These days the Royals play in the rather complicated Bolivian second tier, the Copa Simón Bolívar. This competition consists of nine regional leagues. Bothe the winners and runners up of each division then play in a knockout tournament to decide who gets promoted to the Bolivian Professional League. To that end, the team are wildly unpopular among teams from the more lower-lying regions of the country, as their 28,000 capacity Estadio Jesús Bermúdez ground is a breath-sapping 3710 meters above sea level!

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FC Warrior Valga (Estonia)

FC Warrior are an Estonian team who play in the second tier of their still fairly fresh national league. They were formed in 1990 in the town of Valga in the south of the country, right on the border with Latvia. Indeed, up until 1920, Valga and their just-across-the-border neighbours Valka were one-and-the-same place, and still remained closely twinned to this day.

They managed to win the second level of the national league - the Esiliiga - in 2002, under their old name FC Valga, and plied their trade in the top flight Meistriliiga until their relegation back down in 2007. Much like the Scottish Premier League, each division has ten teams, who play each other four times in a championship season, which in Estonia runs from April to November.

Now you'd think being formed in and named after the town of Valga, they'd actually play there. Well despite citing their home as the Valga Kekstaadoin on their official biog, they've actually been playing their home matches at the 500 capacity Sportland Stadium in Tallinn - some 200 miles to the North.

Sportland in itself is a bit of an odd one, as it's actually the training pitch attached to the 10,000 capacity Lilleküla Stadium, home to Flora Tallinn and the Estonian national team. Quite how, and indeed why, they found themselves there, and what the residents of Valga have to say about this is unknown. But what is clear is that you can only love a club with the word Warrior in their name and a pair of crossed swords on their badge!

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Albinegros de Orizaba (Mexico)

In a country whose domestic football is already a heady confusion of franchises and bankruptcy, Albinegros de Orizaba have in turns disappeared and come back more times than Elvis, Frank Sinatra and Lazarus put together. As such, their's is a complicated and difficult chain of events to follow, so if you know more about them than I and see that I've missed something important out, please do let me know!

Formed as a general sports club, the Orizaba Athletic Club, in 1898, their football wing kicked off three years later. Founded by Scotsman Duncan MacOmish, they were one of five clubs in the La Liga Mexicana de Football Amateur Association - the first national league in the country - which they won, notching them down in history as Mexico's debut champions. Interestingly, the whole of the winning squad were Scottish. Sadly, this was to be the height of the team's achievements.

Playing in the lovely little city of Orizaba in the mountainous Veracruz region in the south of Mexico, the snow-topped peak you can see on their badge is the Pico de Orizaba, a volcano that at 18,490 ft is the highest point in Mexico - and indeed the third highest peak in the whole North American continent. The mountain is clearly visible from their traditional Estadio Socum home. 


However, this is where things begin to get complicated. The team, then still named Orizaba Athletic Club, saw some internal wrangling immediately after their title season and immediately folded, only to return in 1906, when it joined the Liga Veracruzana under the name Asociación Deportiva Orizabeña. They plodded along in their regional league until1943, when they were invited to join the Liga Mayor - Mexico's first professional league. Here they stayed until 1949, when after a little more internal wrangling, they went out of business for a second time.

Fast forward to 1967, when a newly reformed ADO joined the newly formed Mexican third division. Four seasons later they won their way up to the second tier, where they have plied their trade ever since. Well kind of. Now each level of the Mexican league has regional inter divisions, and also has two championships a year. In 2002, after a poor season, they almost went out of business again, but were restored by the president of Club Bachilleres de Guadalajara, Juan Manuel Garcia, under their new name of Albinegros de Orizaba. Are you following? It gets more complicated still!

After another bad year, their principal franchise was sold to the team who briefly became Lagartos de Tabasco - but their reserve team kept on the Albinegros name and have played as such ever since. Well kinda. In 2009, the team then known as Tiburones Rojos de Coatzacoalcos swapped franchises and moved to the city of Orizaba to play on as Albinegros. For a bit at least. Last season also saw them temporarily move stadiums to Veracruz to go play at the Estadio Luis Pirata Fuente while their grand old stadium - first built in 1899, and one of the oldest in Mexico - was brought up to scratch for the league.



So it's been a complicated history - and one that will probably have changed at least twice more by the time you get to read this - but throughout all of this, (well, most of it) the people of Orizaba have had one heck of an interesting team to follow!

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A Dove Grows Up

Libby the mourning dove quickly worked her way into our hearts. Doves are gentle, mildly curious, and extremely affectionate birds. Libby wasn't the kind to crash into walls and windows, even after she started flying. She just wanted to be in the same room with whomever was around.She took up residence on my drafting board lamp

but the back of the drawing chair was always her favorite spot.

She is a dove of comfort. In this photo, taken May 22, she's still being hand-fed, so she just sits around and waits for the next syringe full of happiness to come her way. After a bad early start (falling out of her nest into a yardful of cats), life definitely improved for Libby.
She stretches a wing
and preens her ratty tail. Her tail shows evidence of a period of starvation, with fault bars where the feather growth was interrupted, leading to a weak spot on the feather. We'd soon fix that.


She does that head-bob thing doves do, where they shoot their little heads out as if they've just seen something really interesting.

It's really nice having her nearby as I work, because I'm painting mourning doves for the chapter in my book.
Being able to look out the window and see courting doves, draw their poses from life, and then to bury my nose in the warm grainy smell of a hand-raised baby--for a bird artist, it doesn't get better than that.


A little horn-toot here: NPR just released a new compilation CD called Sound Treks: Birds. Three of my pieces and one of Bill's are featured in its 25 fascinating tracks. You can purchase the CD or hear a teaser featuring both Zick and Bill here. I'm mighty pleased that they ended the CD with "Hummingbird Summer."

A Lucky Dove

April 21, 2010: The phone rings. A man with a rough, gravelly voice tells me he's got a baby mourning dove that fell out of a nest in his yard. Right away he gets points for knowing what it is; 99% of the people who call me have a "baby bird" without a clue what it is. "I think it's a robin. Or a finch." One guy called me and said he had this weird bird that he thought was probably a pheasant. I walked him through a bunch of questions about size, color, and bill shape and deduced that he'd found a car-hit whip-poor-will. And whip-poor-will it was.

Anyway, we went through the drill of establishing whether we had a prayer of returning it to its nest. Modos build crappy little twig platforms that probably shouldn't be called nests. They're more like launching pads for premature babies. No, the nest was 16' up in a white pine at the end of a branch. And he had 7 barn cats hunting his yard. :-/ We talked about that. Getting a little lecture is part of the price of taking a baby bird off someone's hands. "Barn cat" is the catch-all phrase people use for free-roaming cats. It subtly sanctions the situation; it implies that the cats have a job, keeping a barn free of rodents. But they also breed like locusts, pass along disease, keep the surrounding area free of fledgling birds, and create many more problems than they address. If you could just train a cat to kill only house mice, instead of every native wildlife species it can grab...sigh. In researching rabies for the Zickbat posts, I learned that feral cats are a rapidly growing reservoir for this deadly virus, which casts those often government-subsidized feral cat colonies in an interesting light, doesn't it? Uh oh. Here I go on feral cats again. Must...move...away...from...green...kryptonite, unhhh.....

So I looked at my calendar and decided I had a month and a half to give to a baby dove and drove into town to pick it up. I took a syringe of parrot baby formula with me and fed it right there on Don's knee as he sat at his desk behind the cafeteria at our community college. The dove looked pleasantly surprised to have its empty crop suddenly filled with warm formula, and Don was enormously pleased to have this little bird finally full of food and in expert hands. I was happy to have met Don--he is well-versed in wild things, a farm boy like my dad was.



The dove, which looked to be about 13 days old and about a week from being able to leave the nest, looked little and lost in the covered tank that would be her interim home, so I made her (we couldn't tell its sex, so randomly assigned one) a nest of grasses and put a chipmunk in for warmth and snuggling.

Awww. Doves are very tactile creatures and appreciate being sat upon.

It wasn't long before Olivia (as Phoebe named her) was sitting upon the chipmunk, and crapping on him, too.

It also wasn't long before Liam and Phoebe fell in love with Libby Lou. (Olivia seemed a little formal for such a nuzzly little thing.)

By April 25, Libby was starting to show interest in small peckable things.

She picked up seeds, which we kept strewn everywhere she was, tested them with her bill, and then flung them. I didn't see her actually eat one until April 28, and captured the moment with my camera. Having syringe fed her every two hours, dawn to dusk, for a week, I was very happy to see something else go down that gullet. In this photo, she's about 20 days old. As soon as I saw her swallow a seed, I started drawing back on feedings, but she would be dependent on the syringe for quite awhile longer--until May 10, in fact, when she turned 32 days old.

There was the problem of what to do with her when we all took off for the New River Birding and Nature Festival the next day: April 29. That's the thing about raising birds. You can't exactly leave a note for the neighbor telling her how to syringe-feed your baby dove every two hours. You can't pay somebody enough to do that. So Libby Lou attended her first birding festival.

I never could have taken Libby on without my crack bird-raising assistant, Phoebe. She had been learning how to syringe-feed Libby and was getting really good at it; in fact she even got Libby to gape for her, which makes feeding much easier. So Phoebe took Libby along with her wherever she went while I was occupied all day leading field trips.


It was a little inconvenient, but Phoebe never complained. She loves Libby Lou. So did Little Orange Guy and Little Orange Librarian.

Meeting Sara and Kelly was the bomb. We got along like a fisherman's shanty afire. We got along like cod tongues and potatoes, like strong tea and Carnation evaporated milk.** Like partridgeberry squares and...oh well, you know what I mean. Just met 'em, already miss 'em.



Libby quickly transformed from a bit of an ugly doveling


to a four-ounce beauty. She still had a ways to go, but she was surely one lucky dove.



**obscure Newfoundland references for LOG and Kelly