Update : Pigeon Cam is no longer set up as it was having a negative impact on our productivity at work, and the pigeon is less prone to getting stuck upside down in a corner… The good news is that pigeon is doing as well as can be expected, although she hobbles a bit and will never fly.

Further Update : Sadly Pigeon is no longer with us. She was never fully healed from her injuries but she at least gained a few more years of comfortable living. I’ll miss the way she peered around the corner to watch you if you were in the kitchen with the door open.

A few months back we had an injured pigeon in our garden. Every day we put out food for the pigeon, helping it get better. We were especially impressed with how well pigeon was able to sense cats approaching and hide… turns out she (assumed based on things read on the internet) wasn’t as good at it as we thought… One day, a cat was spotted in the garden with the pigeon pinned down.

The cat was chased off and after a bit of fuss with a tea towel, we managed to catch the pigeon. The thing was in a bit of a state and so we treated its wounds and gave it a course of antibiotics. At first, the pigeon could hardly move and needed help eating and drinking (turns out it really likes sunflower seeds) but much to our surprise, the poor thing pulled through.

As the pigeon has never fully recovered we still have it in the house. She now walks with a bad limp and still has not re-grown her flight feathers. A bit of a scare early on when we came home to find her exhausted and stuck on her back resulted in us setting up a SBC (Single Board Computer) with a webcam pointed at the pigeon. This allowed us to check on the pigeon and make sure she was ok. Over time, the setup gained a better compact digital camera and a webserver. Two picture qualities are available, a small and fast preview image, and a high resolution photo for when you really want to see if she is eating the sweetcorn or the sunflower seeds. Pigeon Cam consists of a Canon G7 digital camera, connected to an Orange Pi SBC, running Apache. Apache works with Flask to allow the picture to be requested and saved by a python script. The camera control is done by a command line program called GPhoto2. Uptime on the Orange Pi is currently 59 days (as of 1st Feb, 2016), although the camera has turned itself off for an unknown reason twice. This could be fixed by placing a relay in the power supply for the camera, with the coil connected to a GPIO pin on the Orange Pi… but that sounds like a load of faff to me.