There's a beautiful Victorian house (left) at the corner of Camden and Lexington streets in Richmond that I've stopped to photograph before when the light was strong and shadows were contrasty.
Today, as I pulled up to the stop sign and crept a bit into the intersection to see if traffic was coming, I noticed the ornate brick chimney on the side of the same house. It hadn't previously caught my attention.
I grabbed the camera, made some quick settings and checking the rear-view mirror to make sure I wasn't holding up traffic (fortunately, there's not much of that in the Mushroom Capital of the World, except during morel-hunting season, Spartan football games and funerals.)
I decided it wasn't the best idea to shoot a photo under duress and pulled through the intersection, parked and got out of the car. That's when I spotted a pigeon happily roosted on the roof peak. I was able to take a few shots without Mr. Walter Pigeon flying off.
I would be lacking in my duty as a conscientious reporter if I didn't mention that Richmond (at least the courthouse square area near where the Richmond News is) is also the Pigeon Capital, if not of the world, then of Missouri.
Pigeons like it here so much that city fathers once organized a pigeon shoot and invited the locals to bring shotguns and hunting rifles to the courtroom roof and have at the plump birds. This is a true story, at least according to the official history of Ray County.
In a purely digital sense, today I did what Ray Countians do: I shot a pigeon. But thanks to the Digital Age, there were no casualties and no feathers flew.
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