Dee Dee Detroit (aka Aspen)

On October 8th, MickaCoo was overfull and I was on my way to the Marin Humane Society with four pigeons from South Bay shelters. I stopped at SFACC (also full up) to pick up some kings and chickens to take along.

At SFACC, I met a big, adult king pigeon named Aspen that had dried blood around her nares and seemed stiff and painful, probably from an impact injury. She had been found as a stray in Bernal Heights on 9/28. Since she wasn't a candidate for going to join the others at Marin Humane Society, I brought her home with me.

I LOVE that volunteers are naming the kings now and I rarely change the names they're given but, since I was caring for Aspen (and apparently that involves me talking to her a lot), I just couldn't bring myself to call her Aspen or Aspie or Pen. She struck me not so much as the young, hip, clean town of Aspen as she did of the old, been-through-the-wringer city of Detroit and so I changed her name to Detroit and I call her Dee Dee.



I took her to the vet on and it's her lower back and knees that are painful. I was medicating Dee Dee for the first week but didn't see any improvement and, try as I might to handle her uneventfully, each session ended up with her in a flurry and I'm sure reinjuring whatever's wrong with her.

Now she's recuperating in my downstairs room (she gets bullied in the loft) and I'm just leaving her alone to let time and those incredible pigeon genes do their work.