2 rock doves, joint IQ <1

Stupid, stupid birds. Profoundly stupid birds. You have no idea. Yet.

If you'll read on, I'll tell you.

We have rock pigeons nesting under the eaves of the house. They have been there for years and truth to tell, I don't have the heart to kick them out.

Every year, sometimes twice, they squeeze out eggs, which eventually hatch into ravening chicks which squeak constantly for food.

Seemingly, when they are but a few hours old the notion of flight springs into their pea brains and they flap out of the nest onto the paving below. And poo. Everywhere.

I chase the stupid little things around the courtyard until they give up the game and let me pick them up, climb the ladder and put them back into their nest. Invariably, they poo on me for my trouble. Within minutes they are back on the paving and we repeat the game.

Meantimes, our three cats have also worked out how to play and are now lolling below the nest, waiting, open mouthed for the next flutter as lunch comes to them on the wing. The cats don't seem to mind the mist of poo that envelopes them as they wolf down an extra meal.

And so it goes on. The chicks fall foul of the cats and the parents spend a couple of anxious days looking for their baby and find only disrespectfully discarded feathers. And yet more poo.

Once, one fell prey to our two scotties who got very excited about the flapping and fluttering outside. They braved the fountain of excretia their approach set off and soon, their guilt was clear for all to see; feathery beards. If they had opposible thumbs they'd rule the world, but that's for another day.

Anyway, this time around, there are two of these moronic birds. They are so stupid, they must have both plummeted flap-free from their nest and hit the ground without making the cats or the scotties even vaguely interested.

If that were you or me, we'd be very careful and stay out of the way, keep quiet until the nice humans come along and put us back in our nest. Not so these half wits. Idiocy reigns and these two strut about, poo, squeak incessantly and even wander through the sliding doors into the house and poo there too.

On Sunday, they were huddled together under the garden furniture not a paws reach from all three cats, who were sunning and preening, casting an occasional slitty eye birdwards.

They might survive a few more days to finally learn how to fly without crashing into anything and everything. It's easy to see where the collisions have been; there is a whitish pigeon outline on the windows from the natural oil on their wings and of course, poo everywhere.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.