“I am pigeon-liver’d, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter.”
Hamlet, Act ii. Sc. 2.
The manner in which they feed their young, to which allusion is made in As You Like It (Act i. Sc. 2), is very remarkable.
Most birds collect for their young, but in the case of pigeons and some others, there exists a provision very similar to that of milk in quadrupeds. “I have discovered,” says John Hunter,[106] “in my enquiries concerning the various modes in which young animals are nourished, that all the dove kind are endowed with a similar power.
“AS PIGEONS FEED THEIR YOUNG.”
“The young pigeon, like the young quadruped, till it is capable of digesting the common food of its kind, is fed
with a substance secreted for that purpose by the parent animal; not, as in the mammalia, by the female alone, but also by the male, which perhaps furnishes this nutriment in a degree still more abundant.
“It is a common property of birds, that both male and female are equally employed in hatching and in feeding their young in the second stage, but this particular mode of nourishment, by means of a substance secreted in their own bodies, is peculiar to certain kinds, and is carried on in the crop.
“Besides the dove kind, I have some reason to suppose parrots to be endowed with the same faculty, as they have the power of throwing up the contents of the crop, and feeding one another.