WORMS
If your hawk is ever pulling out the feathers from her breast, and
thighs, and stomach, and has done so since she was young, and even
after moulting has not forsaken the practice, know that the habit has
become second nature to her, and is incurable. You must put up with
this foulness in her, and fly her as she is. Do not, however, let her
ever get too hungry; for in hunger she will pull out her feathers
all the more. She is like one who has contracted the habit of always
toying with his beard and moustache and pulling out the hairs: some
men, too, I have seen who have a habit of ever plucking out the hair
from their chests, and their armpits, and their pubes. Your hawk is
like one of those and cannot be cured.
If, however, she has newly acquired the habit, it is a symptom of
worms in the stomach.[721] _Treatment_: if a long-winged hawk, give
her sal-ammoniac and sugar-candy, as previously described; but if a
short-winged hawk give her, on alternate days, a few doses of manna.
Perhaps the worms will be got rid of by this simple purging. _Item_:
give her one _nuk͟hūd_ of asafœtida, and by degrees increase the
amount daily till you have reached five _nuk͟hūd_, so that she may
void the worms either by vomiting or by purging. _Item_: rub gall and
tobacco-water on the spots whence she plucks the feathers, and she
will be cured:—
Give your hawk the medicine bitter;
Then the good result ascribe,
With a highly sweetened temper,
To the drug she did imbibe.
_Item_: pluck out all the feathers from the spot at which she
worries, till the bare flesh shows. Mix a little Armenian bole with
wine and old vinegar, and apply it. Fatten her up. Please God she will
be cured. I myself have proved this receipt.[722]
FOOTNOTES:
[721] _K͟hazīna._
[722] _Vide_ Latham’s _The Falcon’s Lure and Cure_, Book I, Part II,
Chap. xlii, for a receipt: “To kill the ranckness and itching that
sometimes will be in Hawkes bloody feathers, which is the cause she
pulls them forth in that estate.” The disease referred to is not
uncommon in cage birds that are carelessly tended, but I have never
met with it in trained hawks in India.