Care in All Its Messiness

Care in all its messiness continues after this notice…

Care in All Its Messiness

Care is rarely neat. Most of the time it arrives as interruption.

I was excited to join the crowded auditorium for my friend Wendy Harcourt’s valedictory at ISS the other week. I found myself sitting with a line that stayed with me long after the event and the celebration that followed. She spoke about care not as something soft or sentimental, but as something lived. In her words, “care is work, an emotion, a disposition, a declaration of love.”

A few days later, to my surprise, that care landed on top of my rabbit hutch. And I am not speaking symbolically. I mean literally.

Typically, it arrived not in a way that gave me time to prepare. Two tiny baby pigeons, pressed up against each other in the cold.

“

Care is work, an emotion, a disposition, a declaration of love.

Wendy Harcourt | Valedictory Speech, ISS, March 2026

One of the great gifts of our home in The Hague, and one of the big reasons we chose it, is the garden. For any city dweller who has spent what feels like a lifetime in apartments with terraces, a garden is a huge drawcard. It is full of established trees, which means that for much of the year it feels less like being in a city and more like living inside a small sanctuary. There is birdsong from morning to evening. Pigeons nest in the branches. Other birds come and go all day. There is always some kind of movement, some kind of life.

The downside, of course, is that life attracts other life. The pesky local cats know exactly what those trees offer. Every year, as nesting season begins, we end up witnessing the fragile side of this small urban refuge too. Parent pigeons get taken. Nests are disturbed. Babies fall. Sometimes they have already passed by the time we find them. Sometimes they are alive, but only just.

And every so often, a tiny life enters our orbit and rearranges everything.

Care in all its messiness: When care landed on my rabbit hutch

It was a beautiful sunny, but cold, Saturday afternoon. I had been using the day to catch up on chores around the house and the garden, moving between small practical tasks in that satisfying way you do when the weather finally gives you permission to breathe. At one point I heard a lot of commotion outside. When I looked out the back door, I saw pigeons flying wildly from one of the trees and a cat falling from the branches into the neighbour’s yard.

I noticed it, but not fully. I did not go down to investigate. I was busy. I went back inside and carried on with what I was doing. About an hour and a half later, I went to check on the rabbits and give them a treat, something I do several times a day. And there, tucked near the leaves on top of the hutch beneath the tree, I saw what I first thought was a mouse.

I moved in to shoo it away.

Then I realised it was not one tiny creature but two. Two baby pigeons. Squabs, technically. Around three days old, perhaps even younger. Eyes still closed. Featherless. Clinging to each other for warmth.

There is a particular kind of helplessness in seeing something so small and so clearly not equipped for the world it has fallen into. They were defenceless in every possible sense. Cold. Exposed. Vulnerable to cats. Vulnerable to the weather. Vulnerable to time passing.

And me being… well, me, I could not leave them there. So I did what I imagine most people would do first. I tried to put them back.

I found the nest and returned them, hoping the parents would come back and take over. Hoping this could still be handed back to nature. Hoping I would not have to interfere. But as the hours passed and the air cooled, no parent returned. And at a certain point, as the sun disappeared, the choice vanished. What remained was responsibility.

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Care does not always arrive as a feeling. Sometimes it arrives as the moment you understand that if you do nothing, something more vulnerable than you will not survive.

Gregg the Artivist

That, I think, is one of the things I have been reflecting on most. Care does not always arrive as a feeling. Sometimes it arrives as the moment you understand that if you do nothing, something more vulnerable than you will not survive.

So I brought them inside. Slightly panicked about what my partner would say, as it would not be the first time they had come home to find an unexpected addition to the family.

At least their little bellies were full. Their mother had clearly fed them not long before they fell. Their little crops were large and, once placed somewhere safe and heated, they immediately curled into one another and sank into a deep sleep. It felt, for a brief moment, like relief had entered the room with them.

Then came the harder part.

A small life can rearrange everything

The first feed was not something I would want people to witness. My word, it was messy. It was stressful, uncertain, and full of improvisation. Thankfully I still had baby bird formula left over from last year, but these birds were much younger than the pigeon we had cared for before. At least a week younger, maybe more. One of them was clearly smaller and frailer than the other. I later read that the second egg can hatch around forty eight hours after the first, which means the little one may have been only a day old when I found them.

That explained a lot, though it did not make the task any less daunting.

Just to set the scene, there I was, YouTube open, Google open, searching through endless conflicting advice from people feeding birds with syringes, tubes, tiny cups, and elaborate homemade contraptions designed to mimic the parent pigeon’s beak. One eye constantly on them the whole time. It was a lot of trial and error. A lot of second guessing. A lot of trying to get the formula to exactly the right consistency, the right quantity, the right temperature. A lot of waking every three hours through the night to check if they were still warm enough, still breathing properly, still here.

“

Care is rarely neat. Most of the time it arrives as interruption.

Gregg the Artivist

In fact, one of them worried me deeply in those first nights, as the smaller one seemed to struggle to breathe. You could see how fragile the margin was between this tiny body coping and not coping. So alongside the feeds came the watching. The hovering. The lying awake and then getting up again just to make sure.

It is strange how quickly care can reorganise your life.

The day before, I had chores I was ticking off my list. Enjoying being at home alone and getting things done. The next day, I was building an incubator.

A special heated setup appeared in the house. Thermometers. Monitoring. Formula measurements. Timers in the night. I found myself moving through the day according to their needs rather than my own, and doing so not resentfully but instinctively, as though some ancient internal setting had been activated without asking my permission first.

Which, perhaps, is also what care often is. Not neat or scheduled. And not particularly graceful.

An interruption, yes, but one that asks a different question from inconvenience. Not, why is this happening now, but, now that it is happening, how will you respond?

This was not the first time we had found ourselves in this situation with birds so young.

Last year I found a baby pigeon standing in the rain beside his dead mother, whose wing had been torn off, and beside a sibling that had clearly not survived the fall. He was around eleven or twelve days old. Old enough to be bigger and stronger than these two, but still deeply vulnerable and clearly traumatised. We named him Pidgey.

Raising Pidgey was one of those quietly extraordinary experiences that sneaks up on you. He recovered well. His feathers came in beautifully. His markings were perfect. He learned to fly. He always stayed close. Once he chose to start sleeping outside, he would come down into the garden, land on my shoulder, and greet us with what genuinely looked like delight each morning and last thing at night. He was such a happy chappy. Curious and full of character. It was impossible not to love him.

Eventually he found a mate and flew off to build whatever pigeon version of a good life awaited him. And although that was sad, there was also a sense of relief that he could move on to a normal life, aka not listening to me chatter to him for hours about everything that was going on in my life. But before that, there was something incredibly moving about being trusted by a life so small and so dependent. Especially not being a parent myself, there was something profound in taking care of a creature from its most vulnerable state and watching it slowly become itself.

That experience changed me.

I never expected to catch myself thinking so often, how is Pidgey’s new life? Or, I wonder where they are nesting? Or saying repeatedly to my partner in the morning, “I really miss Pidgey waiting patiently in the trees to come say hello.”

And I still really miss the energy he brought to the garden.

So perhaps the emotional investment this time did not begin when I first lifted these two birds from the hutch. Perhaps it began last year with Pidgey, and all that tenderness was simply waiting for another door to open.

Still, there was a very specific moment this time when I knew the line had been crossed. It was not when I found them. It was when I returned them to the nest and realised the parents were not coming back. That was the moment the situation became mine. Or rather, not mine exactly, but mine to answer.

“

Not everything meaningful arrives looking important.

Gregg the Artivist

Since then, the days have been full of tiny changes that somehow feel enormous.

Their eyes have opened.

They recognise me now, or at least they recognise the pattern of my presence. When they wake for a feed, they look for me. Their tiny bodies stir. Their little arms, not yet proper wings, start moving with anticipation. They are still mostly featherless, with that odd soft baby hair that makes them look both prehistoric and slightly ridiculous, but they are beginning to show themselves as individuals. One bolder. One smaller. Mini and Maxi, in my head, though I have not fully committed to the names.

In fact, as I write this, they have just started walking. So I bring them out of the incubator for an hour or so and they sit watching my every keystroke, tucked up next to my arm. Sometimes leaning over to the keyboard to press a key, as if they are learning. I joke that I will have them learning computers in no time, but absolutely no social media.

They sleep pressed together, and sometimes in sleep their bodies twitch and flap as if rehearsing for a future they know nothing about yet. There is something beautiful in that. The body preparing for flight long before flight is possible. The instinct toward life continuing quietly beneath all this vulnerability.

Care is not neat, and that may be the point - Care in all its messiness

And maybe that is part of why this has affected me so much.

Because for all the talk of care, and all the ways we use the word casually, actual care is often much less tidy than the idea of it. Wendy spoke in her valedictory about teaching as “a process of careful disruptions,” and I have found myself thinking about that phrase often this week. Not because feeding baby pigeons is the same as building feminist pedagogy, obviously, but because the phrase captures something true. Care disrupts. It interrupts routines, assumptions, boundaries, and priorities. It asks us to pay attention. It asks us to take risks. It asks us to become answerable to vulnerability.

And the thing is, the disruption is not the problem. The disruption is often the point.

Wendy also writes that care is part of the “life making and life sustaining activities that maintain humans and more than humans that share our life worlds.” I love that phrase, more than humans. It feels especially right in a week like this, when my schedule, sleep, attention, and emotional energy have been reorganised by two creatures who do not know my name, do not understand what I am doing, and yet have entrusted their tiny survival to the warmth of my hands.

There is something deeply centring about that. Not because it is cute. Though yes, they are absurdly small and occasionally ridiculous. Not because it solves anything. It does not.

The world remains exactly as heavy as it was before. The news does not soften because two baby pigeons need formula in the middle of the night. The larger crises remain large. Grief remains grief. Injustice remains injustice.

But care has a way of pulling you back into the scale at which life is actually lived. Into attention and into presence. Into the discipline of noticing that something vulnerable is here, now, and that your response matters even if the outcome is uncertain.

That uncertainty is perhaps the hardest part. I do not just worry whether they will survive these delicate first weeks. I worry whether they will have a normal life. Whether they will grow well. Whether I am getting the temperatures right, the feeding right, the development right. Whether, once they are ready, they will be able to return to the flock and belong there.

Pidgey was so bonded to us that I sometimes think the other pigeons did not quite know what to make of him. He took a long time to find his place. Eventually he did. Eventually he found a mate and flew off. But I still carry some of that concern.

This time, I hope the fact that there are two of them helps. I hope that when the time comes, they will have each other. I hope that whatever awkward human shaped detour begins their lives will not define them forever. I hope that all this effort, all this lost sleep, all this fumbling trial and error and watching and warming and feeding, gives them not just survival but a proper chance at being pigeons. Ordinary, overlooked, city pigeons. Part of the life of the garden again. Back among the branches.

“

As I wrap this up, I am trying to type with one hand while the other cups the two tiny, warm, rapid beating hearts of Mini and Maxi beside me.

Gregg the Artivist

Maybe that is another truth about care. It is not always about being central in the story. Sometimes it is about helping something vulnerable survive long enough to return to a life that no longer needs you.

And maybe that is why this has stayed with me so strongly.

Because after several weeks of writing about larger, heavier things, I found myself brought back to something very small. Something featherless. Something fragile. Something entirely dependent on attention and time and tenderness without certainty.

And in that smallness, I was reminded that not everything meaningful arrives looking important. Sometimes it looks like a sunny Saturday interrupted. Sometimes it looks like guilt for not walking down to the tree sooner. Sometimes it looks like warmed formula at three in the morning. Sometimes it looks like two tiny birds sleeping against each other in an incubator while the house is dark and quiet.

Care is rarely neat. Most of the time it arrives as interruption.

And perhaps the best we can do, with pigeons and people and each other and this wounded world, is not wait until we feel perfectly ready, perfectly informed, or perfectly equipped.

Perhaps the best we can do is notice, respond, and keep showing up.

As I wrap this up, I am trying to type with one hand while the other cups the two tiny, warm, rapid beating hearts of Mini and Maxi beside me. For now, they are safe. For now, they are content. And like me, perhaps, they are waiting to see what comes next.

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FAQ's - Care in All Its Messiness

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Additional Off Site Reading:

1. Valedictory lecture Professor Wendy Harcourt - Official ISS event page for Wendy Harcourt’s valedictory lecture, which gives readers context for the talk that frames the opening of your article.  
2. Radical vulnerability, the politics of belonging and care in teaching - ISS follow up article on Wendy Harcourt’s valedictory, summarising her reflections on intersectionality, belonging, and the ethics of care.  
3. Conundrums of Care - ISS publication page for Wendy Harcourt’s book, introducing it as an overview of why feminist debates on care matter for critical development studies.  
4. Vogeltje gevonden, wat nu? - Dutch Bird Protection guidance on what to do if you find a young bird, including when it may need to be returned to the nest and when intervention is appropriate.