WILD PIGEONS. 
33 
hair and kick my shin, afore I can stop. Now dat is 
all de way I hab to fat de “ lushous lookin’ poultry,” 
you tell of meetin’ Sambo wid. And now, Masser 
Allen, you please send me your Agriculturist dis yere 
for dis recipe, den you will much oblige me, and may¬ 
hap I’se write some more. 
Yours to sarve, 
Sambo. 
Now, here you have Sambo’s secret of fatting 
pigeons and chickens, and we must confess we think 
there is a good deal of philosophy in it, especially in 
the milk part, for we well recollect in our youth, of 
reading about “ pigeon’s milk,” which, it is certain, 
fats the squabs very fast; and if it be so good for 
the young ones, we may infer that cow’s milk, rice, 
&c., are equally good for old ones. But here is the 
description. 
Pigeon’s Milk .—One of the chief peculiarities of 
the common house-pigeon is the double dilatation of 
the crop, which expands on each side of the gullet, 
and which the bird is capable of distending with air, 
as is remarkably shown in the common cropper or 
pouter. It is in this receptacle that the food of the 
young is elaborated by being impregnated with a 
milky fluid, this fluid being more or less abundantly 
secreted according to the age of the squabs. When 
the brood are very young, their food is disgorged by 
the parents in a soft and pulpy state ; as they grow 
up, it is less macerated, till they have reached the age 
of squeakers, and then the grains are expelled from 
the crop almost in their original condition. This cu¬ 
rious provision in the pigeon is the nearest approach 
among birds to the mammae of a higher class of ani¬ 
mals. From the changes which take place in the 
state of the crop during the breeding season, the pi¬ 
geon may be almost said to have, like the mammalia, 
periods of lactation. The fluid is of a greyish milky 
color, coagulates with acids, and forms curd ; so 
that, after all, “ pigeons’ milk” is not the rare and im¬ 
possible commodity which the common joke supposes. 
Wild Pigeons .—These are beautiful birds, and their 
history ought to be familiar to you. They exist in 
vast numbers in the United States, especially at the 
West. We recollect when a boy, of having seen the 
sun literally darkened in their flight—as if it were 
hid in a thick cloud; and then the roar they made 
with their wings as they passed in their airy course, 
was like a squadron of cavalry in the distance march¬ 
ing at full gallop The eminent ornithologist, Audu¬ 
bon, speaks of them ; but one of the finest descrip¬ 
tions of these immense flocks is contained in “ Young 
Kate, a Tale of the Great Kanawha,” written by one 
of the correspondents of this periodical, John Lewi's; 
Esq , of Kentucky, a man of fine genius and varied 
learning. If your parents, boys, ever allow you to 
read a novel, this contains a good moral, much useful 
information, and is an exciting tale. Here is the 
account: 
“ Vast flocks of pigeons had been seen for several 
days passing by,all in one direction, and Mr. Bal- 
lenger had called the attention of his son and daugh¬ 
ter to one flock, which stretched across the heavens 
from the northeast to the southwest; and although 
they were flying with amazing rapidity, it was fifteen 
minutes before the rear of the column had passed. 
“ ‘ Now, let us suppose,’ said Mr. Ballenger, 4 that 
they fly only twelve hundred yards in a minute— 
and they are said to fly a mile, 1760 yards in that 
time—and the column to be only one hundred yards 
wide—and 1 am sure it exceeds that; if we allow 
two pigeons to the square yard in flying, there were 
then 400 times the length of the column, which was 
18,000 yards long : this gives the prodigious number 
of 7,200,000 pigeons in one flock.” Mr. Ballenger 
was startled at the result of his calculations. 
“ Take only the half of it,’ said William Henry, 
‘ and what an amazing number—upward of three 
millions and a half in a single flight! I killed one 
the other day, and he had at least a gill of acorns in 
his crop. Now I am sure that more than four times 
the number in that single flock passed over during 
the day, all going th.e same way—that is, more than 
fourteen millions; and if they only fill their crops 
once during the day, they would consume 109,375 
bushels in a single day, and in the course of a year 
39,921,875 bushels: more than enough to feed the 
mighty army of Xerxes ! How are these creatures 
sustained through the whole year?’ 
‘ God, in his infinite goodness,’ said Mr. Ballenger, 
‘ has adapted the powers of his creatures to their 
modes of existence. The teeming earth is the pas¬ 
ture of all. He feeds the birds of the air as well as 
men and beasts, and he who accomplishes his pur¬ 
pose by the best and most simple means, has made a 
few feathers the instruments to birds of obtaining 
their supplies of food. They have not to pay the 
cost of carriage. The consumer is carried to the 
food, and not the food to the consumer. Birds are 
the Arabs of the air; and such is the rapidity of their 
flight, such the ease with which they pass over great 
spaces in a short time, that, whenever their appro¬ 
priate food is exhausted in one part of the earth, or 
fails to be produced for a season, they seek it else¬ 
where, and by an unerring instinct find it. Take 
these pigeons as an example: if they only fly from 
their perch during one hour in the morning to their 
feeding ground, and take one to return at nightfall, 
they have eight or ten hours to ravage the fields and 
woods to the distance of forty miles from the roost : 
so that they can lodge at the same place every night 
till all their food is exhausted in a circle around it, 
the diameter of which is eighty miles, embracing an 
area of more than three millions and seventy thou¬ 
sand acres.’ ” 
School. —This number of our paper should find 
you all at school, learning your lessons with a zest 
and pleasure, equal to that of eating apples and 
cracking nuts, or playing blind-man’s-buff, and go- 
hide-and-seek. You can neither feel nor see the 
necessity of this now; you must, therefore, take this 
advice as well as much other upon trust; as older 
heads are wiser than yours, and know from long ex¬ 
perience what is best for you. And don’t be content 
with the mere acquisition of reading, writing, and 
cyphering; but learn something of geography and 
grammar, and then what relates directly to your own 
profession of farming. And in order to do this effec¬ 
tually it would be well worth while to read and 
study at school many things which are contained 
here in the Agriculturist. 
Chemistry. —You ought particularly to study the 
first elements of chemistry. It is not a difficult sci¬ 
ence at all, as many suppose, but as easy of acquisi¬ 
tion as A B C was when you first began your alpha¬ 
bet. Chemistry is the foundation of science. It 
