THE STRUCTURE AND GENERAL CHARACTER OF PIGEONS. 11 



If a pair of chipped or hatching eggs are put under a pair of birds that have been 

 sitting for sixteen days, their presence will always stimulate the secretion of the 

 soft food, and the young will be duly nourished. The formation of this curdy 

 secretion — true pigeon's milk — is a very remarkable fact ; it seems determined 

 'altogether by the process of sitting ; it is produced equally in both parents, 

 though the hen sits for about twenty hours, and the cock usually for only four — 

 namely, from about ten or eleven in the morning to two or three in the afternoon. 



To receive this nourishment the young thrusts its beak into the side of the 

 mouth of the old bird, in such a position that the soft food which is disgorged 

 from the crop of the parent, with a sort of convulsive shudder, is received into the 

 lower mandible or jaw, which is widely expanded in order to receive it. It is 

 singular that so simple an action as this should have been so greatly misrepre- 

 sented as it has been by many writers. Even so good an observer as Yarrell 

 described, in his " British Birds," the old pigeons as feeding the young by placing 

 their beaks in the mouths of the little ones, and overlooked altogether the 

 beautiful adaptation of the broad spoon-shaped lower jaw to the habits of the 

 animals. 



As the young advance, the soft food lessens in quantity, and the grain and seeds 

 that constitute the nourishment of the parents become mingled with it; and 

 when about eight or ten days old the young are fed with disgorged grain and 

 seeds only, until such time as they are able to fly and seek their own nourishment. 



The secretion of this curdy nutriment was first described in the " Philosophical 

 Transactions " by the celebrated physiologist John Hunter, whose account of 

 the process is as follows : — 



" There is infinite variety in the means by which nature provides for the 

 support of the young. In many insects it is effected by the female instinctively 

 depositing the egg, or whatever contains the rudiments of the animal, in such a 

 situation that, when hatched, it may be wdthin reach of proper food ; others, as the 

 humble bee, collect a quantity of peculiar substances which serves both as a nidus 

 for the egg and nourishment for the maggot, when the embryo arrives at that 

 state. Most birds, and many of the bee tribe, collect food for their young. There 

 is likewise a number of animals capable of supplying immediately from their own 

 bodies the nourishment proper for their offspring during this stage, a mode of 

 nourishment which has hitherto been supposed to be peculiar to that class of 

 animals which Linnaeus calls Mammalia ; nor has it, I imagine, been ever suspected 

 to belong to any other. 



" I have, however, in many inquiries concerning the various modes in which 

 young animals are nourished, discovered that all the Dove kind are endowed with 

 similar power. The young pigeon, like the young quadruped, till it is capable of 

 digesting the common food of its kind, is fed with a substance suited for that 

 purpose by the parent- animal; not, as the Mammalia, by the female alone, but 

 also by the male, which, perhaps, furnishes this nutriment in a degree still more 

 abundant. It is a common property of birds, that both male and female are 



