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.
CHAPTER XVI
SUKEY AND HER FOSTER-PIGEON
The winter after Sukey went up to the farm I had some anxiety about her. She had a poor digestion; she always was a small eater, and she seemed to feel the cold of the unusually severe winter we had. Every bitter night she had a copper foot-warmer to sit on, and I would often get up before daylight and give her something to eat. One peculiarity that she has is that she eats by artificial light, a thing that most pigeons will not do. She has always been accustomed to an eleven o’clock supper. She goes to bed at dark, but at eleven, when I enter the room with a lamp, she wakes up, stretches herself, greets me with an amiable “rookety cahoo!” then lets me lift her down to her seed-box, where she eats with the lamp close to her, runs her pink tongue over her lump of rock-salt, drinks heartily, and goes back to her perch.
I do not recommend this supper, except in the case of very delicate or sick birds. Sukey has been so frail that I have often found her almost dead from exhaustion, and she will not eat the different grains that other pigeons eat. She confines herself to rice, millet, and hemp.
When spring came she was much stronger, and I played an amusing trick on her. When she made a nest and laid eggs I went one day to the pigeon-loft outside, where my pet Tweedledum, a daughter of the bird that had come from England, had a nest. I pushed Tweedledum aside, saw that one of her eggs had just broken and a squab lay inside. I took the squab inside his egg-shell and went back to the house. Concealing what I carried I went up to Sukey and told her to go for a walk. This she was very happy to do, and while she was gone I took one of her warm eggs from the nest and put the young squab and his shell inside. Soon she returned, stopped short, and stared at the nest as if to say, “Is it possible that an egg of mine has hatched out at last?”
Then, as if her suspicions were aroused, she turned to me with a dreadful stare of inquiry. I did not dare to laugh. It seems to me that she has grown so intelligent that she knows when I am laughing at her. I nodded my head as if to say, “Yes, it is your own pidgie,” then I pushed her on the nest.