Bad Parenting?

The past couple of weeks have been rough ones in the pigeon pen. I've found 3 dead babies on the ground. This past week I found a baby in the middle of the floor, it's sibling nearby and dead. Two days later there were two very small babies moved out of their nests. I'm not sure if it's bad parenting, or if there is a child abuser in the flock.

This is the first baby I found alive on the pen floor. It took about an hour for this baby to adapt to being tubefed and kept in a warm, clean place in the house.

Now it whistles when it sees me coming, opens its beak for the tube, and cooperates nicely to have pigeon peas rolled down its throat. I'm not sure how I'm going to integrate it back into the pen when it's older.

I had my eye on this baby and its sibling from the time they were hatched, hoping nothing would bother them, and thinking I might have to bring them in if it looked like there was a problem.

I wanted to leave them with the parents as long as possible. It's very hard to handraise a newborn pigeon, it gets easier when they're a few days old.

This baby's sibling had been dragged out of the nest and pecked, all in about an hour after I checked them. I brought them both in right away, hoping they were old enough to tubefeed. The injured sibling didn't have bad wounds, but it did have an impacted crop. It's parents had been feeding it full-sized peas. I wouldn't do this, myself, until a baby was as big as the one in the top picture. I tried massaging the crop and that seemed to loosen up the stuff inside it, but this morning the baby was dead.

The remaining small one seems to be doing fine. I mixed a little yogurt with its food, something I read about online and am hoping will help. So far, so good.

These babies are in aquariums in the den along with the chicks and Bob and his computer. There are now 9 barred bantam OE (1 succumbed), 4 Anconas, and 4 bantam Dominiques. Next week I can move them to larger brooders in the GARAGE!!!