He also disliked being bothered or troubled by any birds, and in a quiet but determined way always got rid of them. Shortly after I got him he took a fancy to double up his long legs, and squat in a nest of straw that I made for him on a broad window ledge. As he sat there in the sun, the other birds went to call on him. He paid no attention to first calls, but when the ringdoves, whose chosen place was near him, came a second time, he leaned over, took one by the tail, and pulled it.
This seemed to me to show some sense of humor, and I afterward noticed other birds indulging in tail-pulling. Canaries are particularly fond of it, and I often have seen a mischievous canary sneaking up to another who is sitting on a branch, his little throat distended, his head back. He is singing the most eloquent song he knows. Perhaps he is showing off before some pretty stranger whose good graces he wishes to gain, when, lo, he is thrown into a most pitiable state of confusion and contortion, for canary number one has seized his tail and has given it a good tweak.
He almost falls back, then with a wrathful squawk the song changes, and he pursues the bad bird to give him a pecking.
The gallinule never liked my ringdoves. I brought them home with me when I came from my European trip. I got them in Boston, though I had resolved to get them in Paris, for one day while walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse, I had fallen in love with a gentle bird that had called, “Coo, oo, oo!” to me, from the door of a laundry.
I turned to speak to him, as he stood bowing unceasingly to me, and the smiling proprietor of the shop informed me that he was very tame and never flew away.
“I shall have a pair of ringdoves when I go home,” I remarked, and therefore purchased two pretty birds, and took them up to Nova Scotia with me. They were gentle birds, but unyielding and obstinate, and they did not want the gallinule in their corner of the aviary. The laundryman had been right about their love for home. They rarely wandered about the aviary, but kept in their pet place. The gallinule, forgetting how he had resented their visits, would insist on calling on them, and then there would be a fight.
Their combats were bloodless, and exceedingly funny. When the doves saw him approaching they would look angry, would slide along their perch, and, lifting their wings, would give him good, sound slaps. All the dove and pigeon tribe fight in this amusing way, and they can give quite hard blows.
The gallinule, finding one on each side of him, would try to look martial, and clapping his wings close to his sides, would tilt backward, double up his long legs, spread his claws flat, and give a splay-footed kick at them. He had the effect of falling over backward as he fought, and his doubling-up process must have been as fatiguing as it was funny, for he always brought it speedily to a close, and beating a retreat, left the doves in possession of their perch.
Before I leave these doves, I must speak of their amusing watchdog habit. All through the night they would cry out if they heard any noise inside the house. It would have been impossible for a burglar to enter the basement, without having them call loudly in concert to him, “Coo-oo, ooo-ooo! Whooo!”
After I had had Beauty for some months, I had another gallinule come over seas and land to join my collection of birds, though he, of course, had not the least intention of entering an aviary when he left the sunny South. Strange to relate, he too was picked up exhausted on the shores of Nova Scotia, but nearer to me, having dropped down close to Dartmouth, a town across the harbor from Halifax.