Fried Pidgeon, Anyone?

I've just discovered the real purpose of grill covers.

Diane and I got all ready to grill for the first time of the season yesterday. We got a bit of a surprise:



My first thought was that we'd had some kind of crazy windstorm, and then I noticed a little blue egg in the middle of all that straw. The darn mourning doves had built a nest in our grill!

This explained several things, like why we've had a pair of mourning doves suddenly hanging out (and pooping) on the corner of our deck this year. It also explains why Indie has been spending a lot of time sniffing the grill in the last few weeks.

The one lone egg was somehow missing this morning, so I don't know what happened to it, but we're going to give the darn creatures a little bit of time to finish their business before we reclaim the grill. Hopefully they haven't done damage or created a fire hazard while they've been in there, but we'll find out soon enough. I don't know why there was only one egg or why it was gone this morning, but hopefully it's just been shifted to another part of the "nest" and wasn't eaten by some *other* creature that discovered how to get in there.

Next year, grill cover.