pigeon or songbird - what is it

Near Portland, Oregon-

In October 2004, around sunset, I heard a terrific thumping scuffling
sound in the attic above my room. I was alarmed that it might have
been a squirrel or cat that figured out how to climb through the
underside of the roof into the attic, but when it happened again a
week later, I took to investigate the matter more closely.

A huge, sleek bird - it might have been a pigeon or songbird - had
figured out a way to get into the attic over my room. It was over
a foot long, but it was sleek and skinny, or narrowly shaped, and
had a grey coat. Its nose was skinnier and narrower than most pigeons'
noses, though. There is some screen wire that keeps things out of
the attic, but in one place it had come loose. That was how the
bird was getting in and out of my attic.

Now, I don't have a digitizing camera, and the bird has disappeared
through the course of the winter, but can anybody make a sophisticated
guess as to what kind of bird had tried to make a nest in the attic
above my room? My attic is loaded up with boxes and boxes of books
and books.

Should I expect the bird to come back in the spring?

I've heard that homing pigeons have incredible senses of memory and
location, and some scientists say that they have magnetic elements
inside their eyes for use as "natural compasses" but can the same
thing be said for songbirds?

|Now, I don't have a digitizing camera, and the bird has disappeared
|through the course of the winter, but can anybody make a sophisticated
|guess as to what kind of bird had tried to make a nest in the attic
|above my room? My attic is loaded up with boxes and boxes of books
|and books.

I've heard that a sophisticated guess or two can guide a person into
the proper identification of the right kind of bird, and this sometimes
applies to the birdnest without the bird ever being seen. Songbirds,
for instance, like to build nests that other birds have a hard getting
to. That's why songbirds like trees where there aren't any limbs to
rest on - they just hover a bit, and zoom right in - but crows and
robins find it convenient to have a limb to perch on, before shinnying
in.

What was strange about the bird that I'm talking about, is that it
is big enough to fight off a crow or robin. It might be a pigeon
or it might be a songbird. I've looked at pictures of birds in books,
and I'm not sure what kind it is. It had to nestle its way through
some screen wire in a place where the wire got folded back. Are pigeons
reknowned for shinnying through screen wire, and spaces that are no
more than 7 to 12 inches wide, into darkness - the part of the attic
that it got into, is ordinarily pitch black at nighttime, merely dark
and murkey grey in the daytime - certainly a pigeon could see better
than I could.