A Face Only A Mother (And Father) Could Love

 A friend suggested I take a photo of a baby pigeon each day to show how fast they grow. I liked the idea, but took a photo only every two days or so. By the age of 27 days, the little bird was up and about, still being fed but close to being indistinguishable from the other young birds. Here it is at two days old, one day after hatching, and already too big to fit back into the shell it came from. The egg beside it never hatched:

At four days old. I kept the unhatched egg in each photo to provide a size comparison:

Six days:

Seven days:

Eleven days:

Thirteen days:

Fifteen days:

Eighteen days:

Twenty days:

Twenty-three days:

At twenty-seven days, it was time for the baby to begin to move among the other birds and find its place in pigeon society. That meant it would be increasingly difficult to tell this bird from any of the others. The parents were still feeding it, but that would soon come to an end also: