marina_bonomi | Refugium Peccatorum... (Reply)

...Which comes from the Litany of Loreto and means literally sinners' refuge but in current Italian, in my part of the country is applied to any place where you can find everything and anything or everyone (the spare room with no set destination, the cabinet where one put things that 'might come useful at some point', the place where everybody you know might be found at some time or another, no matter how diverse they are).

Our house seems to have become a refugium peccatorum for animals, it used to be that I found them and brought them home, the last, a few years ago being

Shikari:

Since a couple of years it looks like animals come looking for us. Some of you might remember this post from last summer about the stray cat who sneaked in to steal food. Well, here is Samir this summer:

But, a few months ago we got another unespected addition (not to mention the mole hubby and I saw coming up the road and put within our fence so that it won't get run over).
This one is a pigeon with a very unusual coloring, likely one of the young of this year, who we saw foraging in the yard. S/he is unusual in many ways, staying mostly on the ground, even to sleep (once I saw it dozing on the ground with three of our cats less than two yards away).
In a very short time the pigeon became bolder and bolder, coming up from the yard and strolling around, still keeping a minimum of a safe distance (about a yard) for the dog and cats. Once it was clear that s/he was here to stay we called hir 'Winnie' (either for Winston or Winifred, hir poise makes us think of the archetipal high-class British, a stereotype, I know, but yet...). Yesterday s/he actually came when I called, and mom told me in the afternoon s/he was dozing under the porch (on the ground, of course) together with Shadow the husky and Mithril the Chartreux.

Here comes Winnie in a pic taken this morning: