PIGEONS AND HAWKS
As Sukey grew older her indifference to other birds became stronger.
I never saw her watch a bird or follow its motions with any interest,
unless it was to get out of the way of a larger bird that she was
afraid of, or to aim a blow at a little one that came too near her. She
had identified herself with human beings; and if there were none near
her, she drew her head into her hood and sat meditatively waiting for
one to come along and play with her.
As she felt so keenly on the subject, I only allowed her to pay flying
visits to the downstairs aviary. All winter, when she could no longer
go out on the veranda, she trotted about the room I had given her, or
sat buried in meditation on a box high up on the wall. That was her
room, her big bed, her box, her pincushion, and her sunny window. She
had driven me from it, though at first I had been willing enough to
share it with her. She used to sleep at my feet, but when she developed
an amusing but tiresome habit of waking up every morning at daylight,
trotting up to the head of the bed and ordering me to play with her, I
chose another room. She often visited me there, and when I was confined
to my room by a cold, she always spent the day with me along with my
books and newspapers. When my tray came up she was always excited
and interested, and trotting up to it, examined it carefully. She
particularly liked creamed toast and my little dish of butter.
One day I heard an outcry in the dining-room below, and found that
she was being driven from the family butter plate there. When I
hurried downstairs in the morning, fearful of being late at family
devotions, I would often hear her coming after me, step by step, her
little claws sounding plainly as she hopped, not flew down. She never
used to fly unless obliged to do so to catch up with us. We did not
fly, and identified with us as she was, she preferred our means of
locomotion. While prayers were going on she sat demurely on a sofa
back, occasionally murmuring “Rookety cahoo!” After breakfast she flew
to my shoulder and descended with me to the aviary, strutted over the
earth floor, then followed me upstairs to her room.
My study was also a favorite place, and often as I sat writing I
would hear a light footstep, then a rush of wings, and Sukey was on
my shoulder. After writing awhile I would look up at her and ask,
“Do you approve of that sentiment, Sukey?” She always bowed her head
politely, and this pigeon habit of bobbing the head was a great source
of amusement to the neighbors’ children, who often called on her.
“Are you glad to see the children, Sukey?” I would ask her, and her bow
was always received with outbursts of laughter. Naturally I was careful
only to ask questions that required an answer in the affirmative. If
I became too much absorbed in my writing to play with her, she would
get impatient, and descending to the desk, would catch at my pen or,
naughtiest trick of all, drink from the ink bottle. Often I have looked
up, discovered a dripping black beak, and have rushed from the room to
wash her mouth.
Although she loved my study when I was alone, she hated it when it was
full of company. Often visitors would beg to see the Princess, and I
would send upstairs for her. She was not really afraid, but she hated a
crowd, and after holding her by force a few minutes, I would put her on
the floor, and with her ruff shaking with anger she would trot into the
hall and go upstairs to her room.
One day she laid an egg on my writing-desk. I took it upstairs, made a
nest of soft cloths for her, and put the egg in it. The third day she
laid another egg. I advised her to take the bed for a nesting-place,
and although she subsequently laid eggs in other places, this, for a
long time, was her chosen home, and she would drive any other bird from
its sacred precincts.
She seemed fascinated by these two eggs, and sat on them nearly all the
time, caressing them, and turning them over and over with her beak.
I was amused with her actions, for she had no shyness and no fear of
human beings. Of course, every bird turns her eggs over to keep them
in condition, but how seldom one sees a bird in the act of turning
them. Sukey’s actions with her eggs then and since convince me that she
really had some kind of attachment for them. I had had an idea before
this that the sitting on eggs was duty work, the only real pleasure
coming with the nestlings.
If any bird dared alight near these precious eggs she would peck
furiously at it. She was also reluctant to leave the eggs unless I
would watch them. If I would sit down beside them she would at once
step carefully off them, lift up her feet like a skirt dancer, and
stretch first one long wing and then another, as if tired of sitting,
then go for a walk about the room.
The instant I rose she would rush back to her nest, and if she got
hungry before I had leisure to return to her, she would hurry to her
seed-box and eat so rapidly that it seemed as if she would choke. She
had made up her pigeon mind that she would not let those beloved eggs
get cold.
Often as I sat by her nest she would bring me little wisps of straw,
and would tuck them around the eggs, or would hold them out to me in
her beak, meaning that I was to have the privilege of arranging them.
Her actions were very curious and interesting, and I could not help
wondering whether human beings were often honored by birds to the
extent of being requested to assist in the work of making a nest.
Better than straws were hairpins, hatpins, or safety-pins. She had been
brought up in a bedroom, and my pincushion had always been an object of
interest to her. I have seen her take a long hatpin in her beak, toss
it up in the air, catch it, and go to her nest with it.
The invisible hairpins were her chief favorites, and one day my sister
said to me, “I cannot imagine where all my invisible hairpins are.”
“Go to Sukey’s nest,” I said, and there she found neatly arranged
around the eggs the missing hairpins. I have often taken sharp pins
from her nest, in the fear that she might stick them into herself.
After a time I began to worry about her prolonged sitting. She had no
mate to relieve her, and to sit day and night, except in the short
intervals when I took care of her eggs for her, was too great a strain
on her constitution. So one day I went down to the aviary, got a
youthful squab from one of the pigeon nests there, and taking away one
of Sukey’s eggs, slipped the squab in its place. Her back was turned
to me during this last maneuver, but presently she came trotting along
with a straw in her beak.
When she saw the squab she stopped short with a dreadful stare, then
dropping her straw she took squabbie by the neck and shook his tender
flesh till I hastened to rescue him, and gave her back her egg.
Later on I took her eggs away from her and put them in a covered box.
She seemed to know they were in the box, for one day I found her trying
to worry the cover off, and a second day she had the cover off and was
sitting on the eggs. A third time I found her standing on the box and
fighting my doves away from it. This time I turned the doves away,
lifted the cover, and she stepped in and sat on the eggs. One day,
after I had put the eggs in the box, she flew to my shoulder, and I
felt something tickling my ear. Looking around I saw that she had a
straw in her beak and was trying to coax me to put it beside the eggs.
I have often felt sorry that I have not kept a record of the number of
eggs that my Princess has laid. She begins in the spring and lays all
summer, sometimes one, sometimes two eggs, and at intervals of about
six weeks. When she was two years old I took her with my other pigeons
to my farm in the country.
I now had quite a number of pigeons. Among them a special favorite was
Crippie, a lame black tumbler. He was fat and in good condition, but
had had since he began life an absurd walk or waddle, his legs being
spread very far apart. I had been advised to kill him, but had refused.
There was nothing the matter with him but his lameness, and he was a
dear, gentle bird, and had been partly brought up by hand. A tumbler
is supposed to turn over and over in the air as he flies, but Crippie
never tumbled.
Two other pet birds were homers--Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Their
parents had deserted them, and they too had been brought up by hand.
Then I had magpie pigeons, an exquisite white owl pigeon called Owlie,
some archangels, and specimens of a few other birds.
I had had a demure nun pigeon that I bought in Boston. At least she
looked demure with her convent-like garb, but she turned out to be
a vixen, and used to drive my guineapigs about the aviary till they
succumbed with fright. At first it was amusing to see her marshaling
the pigs and driving them before her, but I soon found out that what
was fun for her was death for the pigs, so I sent her away. When I took
all these fancy pigeons to the country I confined them in a loft for a
time till they got used to their new quarters and began to make nests.
Then I opened a window and allowed them to go out.
My whole family was impressed by the delight of these birds in real,
untrammeled liberty. For generations their ancestors had been kept
in confinement, but there was enough wild blood left to make them
appreciate what was now spread before them. The first day I let
them out they flew about uncertainly, then sat in a row on top of
the carriage-house. The building was reasonably high, the barn was
higher, the near-by house was surrounded by tall trees, below them
were meadows, plowed fields, and a pine wood. They had altogether two
hundred acres of their own property, and beyond stretched one large
farm after another, along one of the most beautiful valleys in the
world--the one which finally reaches the far-famed land of Longfellow’s
“Evangeline.”
No wonder that the pigeons were delighted. They timidly tried another
flight, then another, wheeling in wider and wider circles, always
coming back to the carriage-house, and gazing about them as if they
were “lost in wonder, love, and praise,” my father sagely remarked.
As the days went by they flew constantly about the farm. I never saw
one leave it, though I heard of some of my old homers calling at
distant farms. The young homers hatched on the place would, of course,
not leave us.
Away beyond the farm was the long North Mountain, and beyond the
mountain was the Bay of Fundy, well known for its high tides. So, in
connection with my pigeons, I could truthfully recite Walter Prichard
Eaton’s lines:
The doorway of their coop unloosed, they spring
Straight up above the housetops noisily;
An instant pause, a sudden swoop of glee,
Then high against the blue on tireless wing
Their wide-expanding, perfect circles fling;
From that great height they look to open sea,
The far green woods smile up invitingly--
But still the keeper counts their homecoming.
Unfortunately, when we first went to the farm, there were a few hawks
about that succeeded in carrying off a number of my beautiful pigeons.
These hawks came with such frightful celerity that unless one sat all
the time with a gun in hand it was impossible to shoot them. We could
protect the chickens, for when the hawk was coming, the little wild
birds that were fed about the farmhouse would scurry through the air
in a hurried, unnatural way. If we noticed them, and called to the
chickens, the petted things would run for shelter. Not so the pigeons.
They never hurried to their lofts. When they saw a hawk they rose
swiftly in the air and flew madly round and round.
The hawk would get the poor flyers, and any that were handicapped,
except Crippie and Owlie. He never got them, and I wondered at it.
He carried off a fine, red jacobin that I had sent up from Halifax,
hoping Sukey would be friendly with him. She beat him so persistently
that I put him out with the others. He looked very handsome sitting up
aloft with his red hood about his head, but one day he disappeared, and
later I found a heap of his pretty feathers at the foot of a pine tree
where the hawk had carried him to tear him to pieces.
I lost twenty pigeons, but only three chickens. It was very pathetic
to see those three disappearing. On one occasion I was close by. The
hawk seemed to fall like a bullet from a clear sky. He seized the poor
little unfortunate and bore it off by the head, its legs dangling
helplessly in the air.
These hawks were not large ones, and at a little distance looked like
one of my big homers. After a time we were not so much troubled by
them. I had tried to get rid of them by keeping guineahens, for the
country people round about said that no hawk will approach a farm where
a guineahen is kept. I thought I would try the experiment, and bought a
fine pair of guineahens that never wandered, as many of the tribe do.
The hawks did not mind them at all, and swooped down on the chickens
when they were close by.
Our best friends were the crows and the kingbirds. A pair of crows
built a nest in a tall tree close to the boundary of our farm, and one
of them was always sailing through the air to keep the hawks away. More
intrepid than the crows were the kingbirds or beemartins, so called
because of their supposed fondness for the honey bee, though it is
now asserted that they eat only the drones. These kingbirds had a nest
close to us, and it was most gratifying to see the way in which they
chased both crows and hawks. They were better than a gun, and I used to
wish long and earnestly that there was some way in which I could reward
them.
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