Of course, they did not go near it, and in the morning I found my pigeon again apparently drawing its last breath. I hurried it upstairs, and it did not go down again. I made it a bed in a little basket, and kept it near me night and day. It was powerfully ugly, and the family teased me a good deal about my pigeon, but I told them I had made a vow to save its life. I tried a good many experiments in feeding it, and very often in the middle of the night I would spring up and look at the basket to see if the little delicate creature were still alive.
Later on I learned how to bring up young pigeons successfully, but this one I almost killed by giving wrong food to it. I found later that a mixture of rolled oats, bread crumbs, and a few drops of milk and water—the whole made very fine and soft, agreed well with it. I got a medicine-dropper and a syringe, but for some time it would only eat from between my teeth or my fingers, this being the nearest approach to the parents’ beak. After a while I made different kinds of grain and seeds into pills and slipped them down its throat. The bird soon became very tame, and would flap its wings and scream for food whenever it saw me. It was dubbed Princess Sukey by my sister, but for some time she was a ridiculous looking princess. I found she had a form of indigestion, and as she has had this ever since, I fancy that her parents, discovering this, had made up their minds that she was not worth bringing up.
A curious thing happened as soon as she opened her eyes. The young pigeons in the aviary always hissed at human beings who went near them. Princess Sukey, on account of her upbringing, looked upon human beings as her friends, and when I showed her a bird for the first time, she rose up in her nest, clapped her beak, and hissed in terror.
She hated birds, and has hated them ever since. One day, when she was a plump young pigeon, her father walked up to her, bowing and scraping as polite pigeons do. I was greatly amused to see Sukey take him by the long neck feathers and give him a good shaking. She had made up her pigeon mind to give birds the go-by and join her lot with me and my family, for she liked all of us, though I was her chief favorite, as I represented her food supply.
This father of hers was rather an inconstant bird. Once, when his own mate was very much in need of his services to help her in bringing up young ones, he left her to play with a lively, attractive pigeon, called Fanny Fantail. This Fanny was a bird without a mate, and a lonely male or female pigeon, or any other kind of bird, makes more trouble in an aviary than half a dozen pairs. I had to separate her from the jacobin before he would go back to his own nest.
For months Sukey was one of the ugliest birds that I ever saw. She had a long, poor crop of feathers on her body, but her big hood did not develop until she was full-grown. Her bare neck, ugly head, and yellowish eyes, made her a kind of laughing-stock, but soon there was a transformation. The blue blood in her told, and when her lovely red and white feathers did start, she was a beauty. It was the story of the ugly duckling over again. Her superb indifference to birds amused us greatly. Through the summer she followed me about the roof-veranda, sat in my room with me, or waited patiently for me if I went out. During my absence she would sometimes attach herself to some other member of the family. She was very fond of playing with me. She would sit on my shoulder, and run her beak over my ear and cheek; and if I were reading, she would peck the leaves of my book. If I sewed, she caught my thread and sometimes so bothered me that I would put her out of the room and shut the door. Then she was in distress, and would trot up and down the window ledge outside, tapping the glass with her beak, and pleading eloquently to be allowed in again.
The veranda was alive with birds, but she paid no attention to them, unless one of them came near her, to have a sly peep in the tiny mirror on the window ledge. Any such presuming bird, if she could catch it, she would beat thoroughly. She had no curiosity about new things, except human beings. One day I placed her in front of a horned toad, and my sister took her photograph. She seemed to be looking intelligently and inquiringly at it, but in reality I don’t think she cared in the least about it.
These horned toads are really lizards, and in California we used to keep them in our rooms. Their most remarkable habit is that of ejecting blood from their eyes. My sister once saw a toad that was being teased spurt blood from its eyes. After exercising this power the toad often becomes limp and exhausted.
The Mexicans call them “sacred toads,” because they weep these tears of blood. It is thought that this discharge of blood is a means of protection. When worried by a superior animal, the little toad can partly blind his enemy by shooting blood in his eye; and while the enemy is recovering from the pain, which the blood seems to cause him, the toad can make his escape.
The creature was not afraid of Sukey, and I never saw him shoot blood from his eyes while with us. Unfortunately he was stepped on and died.