A story about a pigeon

Those of us who were in the Museum Administration class last night enjoyed a story about a troublesome pigeon. I thought I'd share my own story about a pigeon who caused a ruckus at my former workplace, Eltham Palace.

We used to have quite a lot of TV/ film / photo shoots there. They were generally the most long and boring days, but this one had a brief episode of excitement.

I was standing in the entrance hall of the building, it looks like this:  The glass doors you can see were open and a film crew was bringing in all there equipment. Myself and my colleague, Tom, who was new at the time were stood in a doorway just to the right of the picture. It was Tom's first time supervising filming and I was explaining what goes on and what we had to do etc. I was just saying something about having to watch people closely because they like to touch things and move furniture when something flew past my head. I assumed that one of the film crew had thrown something so I was about to put my grouchy face on, when I looked down at my feet. There was a pigeon. I looked up at Tom, then looked back at the pigeon. It was still a pigeon. "Right, that's not supposed to be there" I said (just in case the obvious needed stating) I put Tom on pigeon guard duty (this was a mistake, despite being a wonderful human being, Tom has no air of authority when it comes to birds) I went to see if we had a net or anything (cue conversations with other staff involving the words "No, I'm not joking, there is a pigeon in the entrance hall") We were concerned about the pigeon getting on to the expensive and irreplaceable rug in the centre of the room. Tom had valiantly stopped this but had managed to terrify the pigeon into hiding under a sideboard.

After a lengthy discussion about what to do we blocked the pigeon in with 'Caution - wet floor' signs then emptied the basket we used to store audio guides out and used the signs to coax the pigeon into the basket. We then set it free to cause havoc and destruction elsewhere.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is, pigeons are trouble perhaps. Probably that common sense and the ability to deal with the unexpected are important to any public historian.