No, really...it happened last week.  

It is a regular routine for our owner to share some peanuts with the local birds, and regularly the office team refills the bird feeder and bird bath.  

We were all a little surprised to see a pigeon hanging out at the front door last Thursday.

We noticed him in the morning and then at noon he was still around, and was not shy nor startled as we got closer to him.  

We could see he was banded, being country folk here at Metalcraft Industries, there are some gardeners and farm owners on our team.  

We turned to the "egg lady" Kay, for an assist.  Kay has chickens on her farm (she regularly provides us each with a dozen eggs on a weekly basis) and she is well versed in handling birds so she held the pigeon while Amanda read the banded leg tags.  

With a quick look-up on the internet we discovered this was a racing pigeon and we contacted the owner.  

We are advised that it could be a day or two of rest and then he may take flight again...the owner may send someone to pick him up, but frankly we think Kay is planning to add him to her farm family if nobody shows up.

Friday update...the pigeon was still with us, Kay will plan to pick him up this afternoon, he is a lucky bird.

He is supervising the loading dock until she arrives to pick him up.  

He took an interest in the space between the ramp and the dock where we have a storage container and alerted us of another visitor, the opossum.

The opossum was stuck between the storage container and the ramp, we do not know for how long, but he had rubbed some fur off of his snout and his back, so we assumed he has been struggling to free him self.  As George Clooney would say he was in a "tight spot".

By afternoon we brought the forklift over from our manufacturing plant and lifted the storage container so we could give the opossum a few inches to turn around and find his way back out, within the hour it was a success and he ran free into the woods.  I am sure he was relieved to be out of that predicament.

I would like to add one more pigeon sighting this past weekend.  Saturday while we were waiting for a repairman to come look at the well that quit, we noticed a pigeon on the roof top of my home.  Are you kidding?  

It flew down to the patio and we could see it was triple tagged.  It stayed for an hour or so, and then off to its destination unknown.

Yes, I would describe our business location, as well as my home rural, sort of out in the sticks... 

Ocala in general is farm land, so the opossum was not a great surprise, but the two pigeons, well they were worth writing about.  

Country life, you gotta love it.