LIVERMORE FALLS — Four-year-old Kailee Parker ran her fingers down the sleek gray feathers of a racing pigeon her family found flying outside their house earlier this month.
“It is soft,” Kailee said Friday. The family has named it Zazu after the hornbill in “The Lion King.”
When her mother, Heather Gordon, placed the pigeon on her arm, Kailee stood very still. After a couple of minutes, the bird flew off the makeshift perch.
The family was sitting down to dinner March 10 at a table in front of a picture window. They saw a bird swoop down and land on the roof. A neighbor out walking tried to coax it down, Gordon said.
Gordon tried to feed it french fries because they didn’t have any bird seed. Zazu wouldn’t eat the fries but continued to fly around the yard. When it landed on a windowsill, Gordon picked the bird up and set it on her lap.
“He just let me pick him up and he has been here ever since,” she said.
During the day, Zazu goes out and flies around and goes into the shed for dinner. He comes inside at night to sleep in a cage in the laundry room.
The first night, Zazu would eat only from Kailee’s hand.
“He tickled my hand when he ate the french fries,” Kailee said.
The pigeon has a green band with registration numbers on it around its left leg. Gordon said she called the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to see what to do. That launched nearly a whole day of phone calls to try to find out where the speed-racing pigeon was from and who owns it. Normally, a band around the leg means it is a domestic pigeon and not wild. The pigeon is missing part of a digit.
An association has tracked the bird to a person from Massachusetts who either owned the bird or sold the bird, said Gordon’s fiance, Richard Adams III.
The family had not heard back from the association to see what to do next, Gordon said. They will continue to nurse the bird until someone claims it.
“If it was our bird, I would want someone to do the same for us,” she said.
The bird is estimated to weigh 3 to 4 pounds and is about 10 inches tall from its tail to the top of its head, Adams said.
Kailee got down on her knees and picked up some wild birdseed and held it out to Zazu. He was not interested and ended up back in his cage.
“I feed him good,” Kailee said. “I give him food and water and help my mother clean his cage.”
dperry@sunjournal.com
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- Heather Gordon and her daughter, Kailee Parker, 4, laugh as a racing pigeon nibbles on the fingers of her son, Dezmon Adams, 16 months, in Livermore Falls. The family found the bird flying around their home and realized it was domesticated. They are trying to locate its owner, who possibly is in Massachusetts.
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- Heather Gordon shows the leg band on a racing pigeon she found at her home in Livermore Falls. An association has tracked the bird to a person from Massachusetts who either owned the bird or sold the bird, said Gordon’s fiance, Richard Adams III.
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- “We call him Zazu, from ‘The Lion King,'” said Heather Gordon of the racing pigeon she found in Livermore Falls.
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