FANCIERS’ JOURNAL AND POULTRY EXCHANGE 
457 
MOORE’S WORK ON PIGEONS. 
(Continued from page 377.) 
call them foppish gestures, woo the female, and endeavor to 
incline her to his embraces ; she, if consenting, will soon 
show it by her motions, as sweeping her tail, spreading her 
wings, and giving a nod with her head, as much as to say, 
Good sir, you may if you please ; from thence they proceed 
to billing, in which action the hen will put her beak into 
the cock’s, who seems to feed her, after this she will squat 
and readily receive his tread. 
Your hen by this means being rendered prolific, they will 
seek out a nest, or convenient place, for the repository of 
their eggs, into which they will carry straw, frail, feathers, 
and such other materials as they find proper to form a warm 
and soft reception for the egg, neither party being at this 
time idle, though some are more industrious than others, on 
this account, who will lay their eggs almost on the bare 
boards. 
When a hen is nigh the time of her laying, her mate will 
pursue her from place to place, not suffering her to be quiet 
in any place but her nest, out of a peculiar instinct, I sup- 
pose, fearing his offspring should be lost, by her dropping 
her egg in some place improper for incubation. And here 
you must observe that some cocks are so very hot that they 
won’t, at such a time, suffer a hen almost to eat; this will 
render her very weak, and often make her lay a thin-shelled 
or imperfect egg ; to prevent this inconvenience, the best 
way is to take the cock from her, till the egg become to a 
greater perfection in the uterus. 
Pigeons though they will make a great increase in a year, 
yet it is not from the number of eggs they lay at one time, 
for they lay but two, and then immediately proceed to incu- 
bation, but from the frequency of the repeated hatchings, 
which generally happen once in five or six weeks, according 
as they are good or bad breeders. 
When a pigeon has laid her first egg, she rests one day 
between, and on the succeeding day lays her second; they 
generally stand over the first egg, which, if you please, you 
may call an improper incubation, till the next is laid, and 
then sit close, that both young ones may be hatched at once, 
or pretty nearly, though some will sit close on the first, and 
by that means hatch one young one two days before the 
other. 
The time of a pigeon’s incubation, which trouble is equally 
divided between the cock and hen, except that the hen always 
sits at night, is nineteen or twenty days from the first egg, 
and seventeen or eighteen from the last, at which time you 
ought to observe whether the eggs are hatched or not, for 
two special reasons : 
First. Because your young ones, for want of due heat, 
which often happens if the old do not sit close, may want 
strength to extricate themselves out of the shell, and so die 
in it for want of air and proper sustenance, for the nutri- 
ment they received from the internal part of the egg is by 
this time exhausted ; whenever therefore an affair of this 
nature happens, if the egg be chipped or cracked with the 
force of the young one, break the shell all round with your 
nail, or the head of a pin, and you will find your account 
in it. 
Secondly. If your pigeons do not hatch because their eggs 
are addle, or otherwise, you ought to give them a pair, or at 
least one young one to feed off their moist meat, which would 
else make them sick, and they will be apt to lay again too 
soon, which will weaken them very much. 
The young ones being thus ushered into the world, natur- 
ally leads us to take a view of the manner in which it re- 
ceives its first sustenance. We have already mentioned soft 
meat, which is nothing else but a fine soft liquid pap pre- 
pared as it were by instinct by the parents, by a dissolution 
of the hard grains in their craw, against the time that the 
foetus is first disclosed, when weak, naked, and helpless ; this 
soft meat they throw up out of their craw, taking the beak 
of their young ones in their own, and by this means injecting 
it into theirs ; with this meat they continue feeding them for 
six or seven days, when they begin to mix some harder food 
amongst it, until at length they feed them with all whole 
grain. 
THEIR DIET. 
We come now to treat of their diet, or the food proper for 
pigeons. The pigeon is a granivorous bird, and may be fed 
with various sorts of grains, as tares, horse-beans, pease, 
wheat, barley, hempseed, or rape and canary, of each of 
which in their order. 
Of all grains, tares are found to be most adapted to these 
birds, and old tares are much the best, for the new are very 
apt to set your pigeons into a scouring, especially the young 
ones; the same will likewise happen from old tares, if they 
have by any means been touched or immersed in salt or sea- 
water ; for though pigeons love salt, yet too much is very 
pernicious, as, for instance, if in a voyage you give them 
salt water instead of fresh you will soon kill them. 
Horse-beans are the next food to tares, biit you must take 
care to get them as small as possible. There are a sort which 
they call small French ticks, which are good food, and some- 
what cheaper than tares, but liable to two inconveniences : 
first, they are much harder of digestion, and consequently 
will not so readily make soft meat for the young ones; 
secondly, your pigeons are sometimes apt to be choked with 
them, especially young ones, and such whose oesophagus or 
gullet is anyways inclinable to be small, as in most long- 
necked pigeons it is. I had a Carrier the other day which 
fell down off my house into the yard, and when it was taken 
up (I not being at home), it gaped, as I was informed, as if 
for want of breath, and died in a few minutes. It was very 
fat, and seemingly in good health. I opened it to see if I 
could find any cause from within, but all its internals seemed 
perfectly sound and in good order; at last, examining more 
strictly, I found a horse-bean, and that not a very large one, 
sticking in the lower part of the gullet, which, with some 
little difficulty, I pulled out ; and this, I verily believe, was 
the only cause of its death. 
Pease, wheat, and barley are apt to scour your pigeons too 
much, therefore you ought to give them very little, it any, 
of this sort of food. 
There is a sort of diet called Scotch meat, which is pease, 
beans, and tares mixed together; some people feed their 
pigeons with this, because cheap, but the beans are generally 
apt to be too large. 
Hempseed, rape, and canary are food that pigeons are 
very fond of, but by no means ought to be made their con- 
stant diet. 
N.B.— Even French tick beans are not proper for Dutch 
Croppers, or any large Cropt pigeons, because they are apt 
to make them gorge. 
