I said, “Are you positive?”
“There’s no sign of a swelling in the throat.”
I had gone into the vet’s office all set to fight an epidemic and I was not about to leave again without one to fight. “But it could be something equally serious that the other birds might catch?”
“Could be. Diseases caused by bacteria or viruses are usually communicable.”
Bacteria and viruses were more along my line than protozoan parasites, and I warmed to the subject: “What would you do if, for instance, you had a flock of homing pigeons and wanted to prevent the spread of a disease?”
“Well, if there was any urgency about it, I’d give each of them an intramuscular shot of antibiotics.”
The thought of trying to catch several dozen wild pigeons and administer an intramuscular shot of antibiotics to each of them was enough to dampen the enthusiasm of even the keenest epidemic fighter. “What if the urgency wasn’t so great?”
“I’d dissolve the stuff in their drinking water.”
“Suppose they didn’t like the taste and refused to drink it?”
He said he didn’t know if it had any taste but for the sake of science — and a three-dog client who paid her bills promptly — he would find out. He brought from his supply cupboard a plastic bag containing a pink powder. He mixed a little powder in some water, drank it and declared the stuff was delicious and he felt better already. He put the bandtail back in the carton and closed the lid.
“I’m leaving town for a couple of days so I won’t be able to perform an autopsy right away. But I’ll do it as soon as I return. My secretary will call you when there’s something definite to report.”
“The bandtails could all be dead by then.”
“If you’re worried, take along some of the powder. If they’re sick, it’ll help, if they’re not, it won’t hurt.” He wrote the mixing instructions on a piece of paper and gave it to me.
I was halfway home before it occurred to me that getting wild pigeons to accept an antibiotic solution in place of water might be almost as difficult as giving them an intramuscular injection. Our bandtails, unlike the hypothetical homing pigeons I’d mentioned to the veterinarian, were free. They had choices: come or go, take it or leave it. With their swift, direct flight they could range many miles during a day, and if our birdbaths contained a new mixture instead of water, they didn’t have to drink it. There were lots of other birdbaths, and a few creeks which were still flowing, however sluggishly.
We had some things working for us though. The first was food: the range of the birds was restricted by their desire to stick fairly close to their source of supply, especially of milo. This was their favorite food, more because of its size and shape than its taste. One of nature’s economies was not to bother providing pigeons with much sense of taste because they bolt their food. It goes down the esophagus and into the crop with such speed that even the most sensitive taste bud wouldn’t know what hit it.
The second factor in our favor was habit. Like people, birds develop habit patterns. The bandtails had taken a particular fancy to the drip bath on the lower terrace and to a very large ceramic saucer we kept on the ledge. We let the other birdbaths go dry and substituted, for the smaller birds to use, tin pie plates which the pigeons would only tip over if they tried to stand on them. In the drip bath and the ceramic saucer Ken put the antibiotic solution. The arrangement worked very well. Evidently pigeons’ discernment of color is no more highly developed than their sense of taste, for right from the beginning they treated the pink mixture with the foam on top as if it were the purest water.
For the balance of the week the bandtails drank, bathed in and waded through antibiotic. (So did a lot of the other birds, including Houdunit, the brown towhee, who spent a great deal of time breaking the bubbles with his beak.) Keeping the containers full was quite a job, but we had the satisfaction of seeing that the flock was no longer on the decrease. It had leveled off at about fifty bandtails — all of whom looked healthy, or at any rate not sick. Meanwhile we heard nothing from Miss Ames, the vet’s secretary, who was supposed to call us. On Friday I decided to call her since our supply of the antibiotic wouldn’t last through the weekend. I asked her if I could pick up some more of the stuff.
She hesitated for a moment. “Are you sure you need more? You probably don’t realize how expensive it is. I’ve been making out the bills and just the amount you’ve already used is costing you eleven dollars.”
Miss Ames’s sudden concern for my bank account was unexpected, and when I thought of the whopping bills she’d cheerfully sent me in the past, downright ominous. “Something happened, Miss Ames?”
She admitted that something had happened which probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been Tuesday, and if the doctor hadn’t been on the point of departure, and if I hadn’t put the pigeon in a box. “The doctor was leaving just as the rubbish collectors were coming up the driveway for the Tuesday pickup. I was busy in the front office admitting a pair of Schnauzers to board. I thought I heard the doctor say something about refrigerating a pigeon, but by the time I got the Schnauzers settled, I couldn’t find any pigeon...”
Our bandtail had truly been collected.
We never found out what had killed the pigeon. We did learn, a year later, however, what had happened to many of his relatives and friends that autumn.
The following spring and summer brought a sharp increase in the number of bandtails at the feeding station. Some were adults, males and females identical; some were young, easily recognized by their lameness and the lack of a white crescent on the nape of the neck. Then, in early fall, we began to notice the same signs as we had the previous year. Corn and milo were left untouched in the feeders and on the ledge. There were fewer and quieter gatherings of the clan in the eucalyptus trees. Approximately half of our pigeons departed, but no viruses, bacteria or protozoan parasites were involved.
They migrated.
Many volumes have been written on the migration and homing ability of birds. An account of Morgan, the pig-headed pigeon, will add little to the scientific body of evidence, but as a study in determination Morgan’s story deserves telling.
He appeared one late winter in the backyard of Mary and Tom Hyland, who lived on the north side of Santa Barbara. The neighborhood at that time was new, with the shrubbery only half grown and the trees just getting started. In order to compensate for this, the Hylands had gone to great lengths to attract birds.
For birdbaths Tom had arranged a series of saucers, graduated in height and size, the one at the top overflowing into the one below, and so on. Every shrub, tree and flower had been planted to provide various kinds of birds with food, nesting sites or shelter. Even a weed, tree tobacco, was included because hummers and orioles loved its sweet yellow flowers. There were feeders everywhere, for sunflower seeds, for the smaller grains, for bread, for raisins and apples and oranges. Just beyond the yard was a barranca left in its wild state and filled with scrub oak, elderberry, toyon, ceanothus and sycamore trees growing right out of the creek bed. (A birder in our part of southern California can spot creeks a mile away by looking for stands of sycamores. In the dry season this is necessary since the presence or absence of water usually means the presence or absence of birds.)
On my first visit to the Hylands’ backyard I came upon a scene of eerie stillness which, at a feeding station, always indicates the presence of danger. The baths and feeders were all empty, and not a twig moved or a leaf stirred.
I soon found out why. Sitting on a fence post waiting for a piece of action, or rather of the actors, was a sharp-shinned hawk. Its plumage marked it as immature, its size as a female. The only other bird in sight was the pigeon, Morgan, on the roofed perch Tom had built for him just outside the living-room door. Even without the hawk’s juvenal plumage as a guide, I’d have estimated both birds to be very young. An adult pigeon would have had sense enough to remove himself, and an adult sharpshin, especially the much larger, stronger female of the species, would have almost surely attacked. There was other evidence, later on, that when Morgan arrived in the Hylands’ backyard in February, he was very young.