“What is the matter with it?” I asked, “is it bewitched? Its capacity for food seems endless.”
I never had fed a pigeon for so long a time, but Minnie Post-office, as we named her, did not seem able to get a morsel to stay in her bill.
If I did not feed her she would peck at seeds, but they rolled right out of her mouth. For several weeks my brother-in-law assisted me in feeding her, as I had a number of other birds that no one but myself could care for. Three times a day her dish of water, her box of pills, and her feeding bib were brought out. She was a wild pigeon, and in order to keep her still during meal-time we had to put a cloth around her shoulders.
When my brother-in-law had to return to his university, and October approached, I put Minnie downstairs in the aviary.
“I am very sorry,” I said to her, “but I can feed you no longer. If you can’t pick up food for yourself, you will have to starve or be poisoned.”
I tried her for a few days. Her crop always seemed empty, but she lived; and, to my delight, Whistler struck up a friendship with her. I put a box close to the wire netting of his cage, and he stood on a box inside, and Minnie stood on the one outside, and they talked to each other all day long.
One day I put her inside his cage, but she was frightened, and he did not care half as much for the attainable as for the unattainable. When I separated them they went on billing and cooing, and I know are at it yet.
It is an excellent way for her to spend her time. Birds must have something to take up their attention or they mope to death. I know that my gentle Crippie stirs Sukey up occasionally and makes her trot about the ground enough to give her exercise.
One other pigeon I have in my aviary—the Tramp—that a little boy brought to me a week or two before I left home.
“I found this bird in a field,” he said; “I guess his wing is broken.”