The apartment across the courtyard--the twig-lined fixer-upper in the windowbox--is occupied once again, as of yesterday. An industrious young couple has moved in, and looks to be setting up housekeeping among the geraniums.
Paris Play readers will recall that the apartment's builders and first occupants, another pair of Eurasian Collared Doves, successfully fledged two young, and the whole family departed just last month. That saga began here, continued here, and ended here. Those posts included a lot of background on this bird species, which you can read there, so we won't be redundant.
The new couple did some serious renovating, including passing straw beak-to-beak in very close quarters:
The new couple is definitely not the old couple (you'll recall mom had a scissor beak), but we will entertain speculation that it might be the kids (let's say they were brother and sister) come back to raise a new generation. We know enough about Pharaonic royalty, if not about birds, to entertain that notion. Or maybe it's just one of the old kids, with a mate, met on the romantic summer streets of Paris.
And here's a Paris Play first: VIDEO of one half of the new couple doing some serious circle-dance renovating. The Paris Play Nikons have HD video capture technology, which we've been saving for the right occasion, so here's our one-minute video debut: