The mother, to interest her child, related the story of the dove that Noah sent from the ark. To her delight the bird in the story and the bird in the basket combined to soothe the child, who presently fell asleep with a smile on his weary face. He was better, and the birds had helped him.
While pigeons are excellent pets, and a means of relaxation for weary persons, I hold that of all classes to be benefited by their study and care I would put first boys and girls. Taking care of pigeons is easy work. They are hardy creatures, and books as to their management can be easily obtained. Nothing keeps a boy out of mischief like a loft of pigeons. Let him have homers by all means, rather than the elegant fancy pigeon monstrosities that care to do little but strut about a loft. Let him train his birds and have his traveling-basket to send them on railway journeys. Arrangements can be made with railway officials to release them at a given point.
The latest news that I can get of homing pigeons is from the Paris correspondence of the London “Standard.”
It seems that the French authorities in the African Congo district have had some trouble in communicating with each other. They could not keep up a telegraph system, for mischievous natives delighted in cutting down telegraph poles, and in using them for firewood. Wild elephants also amused themselves by uprooting one pole after another. Wireless telegraphy could not be practised on account of the tropical atmosphere often charged with electricity, and generally saturated with moisture.
What was the French government to do? A pigeon post was suggested, and they started with a main pigeon depot of one hundred birds at Brazzaville, and will have a chain of stations at a distance of about twenty-five miles. The chances of a bird being killed or going astray are put down at two per cent., so that a message sent over a hundred miles by four pigeons would have ninety-two chances out of a hundred of reaching its destination. A message of extra importance would be sent in duplicate by two birds. Besides the use of these pigeons for regular postal service, it is planned that travelers, explorers, and military scouts will also carry a few.
One other item of interest about homers I find in a late newspaper: A bird was released from a balloon over Dover, Vt., eight thousand five hundred feet in the air, and above the clouds. The earth was invisible, but the homer in a short time arrived safely at its Fall River cote.
Now, after all my praise of the hard-working, clean-shaped homing pigeon, I must make the confession that the favorite bird in my aviary—the one that I am perhaps foolishly fond of, is not a homer, but a monstrosity. However, there is a reason for my fondness for her, and I will relate the peculiar circumstances that endeared her to me.
I had obtained a pair of ruffed, elegant jacobins, and they had settled down in the box of straw I gave them, and had hatched two tiny squabs. One morning later I found one of these squabs a short distance from the nest. I picked it up and examined it. It had one deformed wing, and had either perished in the nest, or had been gently lifted out to die on the bare ground. I suspect the latter explanation was correct, for the next morning on going into the aviary I found the other squab on the ground. It was opening and shutting its beak painfully, and was evidently just gasping its last. I ran to the furnace-room and laid its cold body on the warm iron.
Then I examined it. There was nothing in its crop, and its little yellow, languishing body was thin and miserable. I took it upstairs, wrapped it up, and put it on a hot water bag, then gave it some bread and milk. The only way I could get the little exhausted creature to eat was by putting its feeble beak to my mouth and letting it take the food from between my half-closed teeth.
When night came I was puzzled to know what to do with it. I did not seem to realize the finality of the parent birds’ act in putting a young one out of the nest, and carefully arranging a cloth nest on a hot water bag, so that it would not die of cold, even if the mother refused to sit on it, I took it down to the aviary and put it with its parents.