He was certainly very hungry. He ate grain out of Tom’s hand while Mary looked on with mixed feelings. The pleasure of seeing a hungry creature eat was marred by the knowledge that pigeons attract pigeons. There were already a great many in the neighborhood and she had been trying to keep them away from the feeders so they wouldn’t drive away the smaller birds, especially the white-throated sparrow which had recently arrived. The white-throated sparrow is a rare winter visitor here, and unlike his common cousins, the whitecrowns and goldcrowns, he is almost never spotted except at a feeding station. Mary wanted him to stay so that her fellow birders would be able to see him.
Perhaps our world is more interesting because so many of our decisions are based on emotions rather than common sense. A friend of ours who breeds dogs tells us that when the time comes to sell a litter, she can bear it only if the pups haven’t been named. I have found this true about birds, too. The death of Old Crip, the departures of Li’l Varmint and Big Boy Blue are more poignant and memorable because these birds were not just a purple finch, a Tennessee warbler and a Steller’s jay — they were our birds and they’d become ours because we’d named them. It may have been the immediate naming of Morgan that made his staying a sure thing.
“He reminds me of Bob Morgan,” Tom said as the pigeon fed out of his hand.
So Morgan he became and as Morgan he remained.
He was no beauty — his plumage could be described as white mottled with black or black mottled with white — but he was faithful. Though I’ve seen geese used as watchdogs, Morgan is the first pigeon I’ve known to assume this role. There was very little traffic in the vicinity of the Hylands’ house, since it was the next to last one on a dead-end street, and perhaps this was why Morgan assumed that that end of the street belonged to him. He would perch on top of the chimney or the telephone pole, moving his head back and forth as our bandtails do when they’re curious. Any approaching car or pedestrian, any dog or cat ambling past on the way to the barranca, Morgan would challenge with a kind of warning grunt, “Who? Who?”
Mary and Tom always knew when someone was coming. The baying of hounds couldn’t have sounded a more effective alarm than Morgan’s rather soft, ominous question, “Who?”
He had other noises, among them a typical coo which he used to communicate with the other pigeons in the neighborhood. At first the Hylands translated this cooing as an invitation to the other birds to come for dinner or at least drop in for a friendly visit. As time went on, however, they were forced to amend the translation.
Human beings with no way of interpreting an animal sound have to judge its intent and meaning by its effect. For example, let’s picture two men standing on a city street. One of them whistles and a cab stops in front of him; the other whistles and the pretty girl passing him blushes or smiles. Without any analysis of pitch or tone, the girl and the cab driver know perfectly well what each whistle means and so does everyone else. If you need proof of this, try using the wrong whistle next time you need a cab.
The Hylands eventually agreed on the translation of Morgan’s pronouncements from the telephone pole: “Listen, you guys, I’ve got a good thing going here. You can come over and look, but don’t louse it up by staying.”
The other pigeons and doves did indeed come over to look, and some even attempted to use the birdbath and steal a few grains of food. When this happened Morgan flew into a terrible rage. He paced back and forth on his perch in a frenzy of activity, flapping his wings, puffing out his feathers, inflating and deflating his throat, from which emerged a weird wild mixture of grunts and clucks. It is no tribute to the brain power of the other pigeons that they got the message and took off.
We have all seen animals exhibit anger in ways that are quite nonhuman. The dog snarls and his hackles rise, the bull lowers his head and charges, the cat spits, the porcupine bristles. But I never expected to see an angry pigeon. Certainly I didn’t imagine that an angry pigeon would look so ludicrously similar to an angry person — the pacing up and down and flailing of arms, the heavy breathing and the wild incoherent speech. To this day I never see a person in a fit of rage without thinking of Morgan.
That first year Morgan fitted smoothly into the Hylands’ routine. He guarded the premises and kept other pigeons away, he followed Mary around as she worked in the garden and he superintended Tom washing the car. As summer progressed and the weather grew warmer, Morgan spent the hottest part of the day in the house, sleeping beside the heirloom clock on the ledge of the brick fireplace, or up on the cornice above the living-room drapes.
Everything went well until the following spring. The Hylands noticed no change in Morgan’s vocal efforts. That such a change had taken place, however, was clearly indicated by the behavior of the other pigeons. Some of them began to come quite boldly into the yard to eat and drink, and a small dapple grey one even landed on Morgan’s perch. Morgan was furious, naturally, since he happened to be on it at the time, but almost immediately his rage turned into display. Indeed, many of the same ploys that had been used to indicate anger now served to show what a fine, strong, handsome fellow he was — the pacing (now an obvious strutting), the inflated neck, the wing flapping.
The Hylands watched the budding romance with considerable misgiving. Their fondness for Morgan did not blind them to his faults. He was, for one thing, set in his ways like an old bachelor and resisted the slightest change in his routine. As for Dapplegray, his mate, she was not so much smitten by Morgan as she was by his perch, which she’d been eyeing covetously for months from a neighbor’s roof.
As if to invalidate the Hylands’ low opinion, Morgan and his bride started to set up housekeeping. Pigeons and doves are inept nest builders anyway and the efforts of Morgan and Dapplegray were pathetic. Dapplegray wanted to build right on the much-admired perch, but the sticks she brought simply fell down. Eventually a nest of sorts was put together, though it was precariously situated on a tiny ledge under the eaves.
Mary Hyland, who had strong nest-building instincts of her own, refused to tolerate such sloppy housekeeping and went to the pet-supply store and bought a substitute nest of the kind used by raisers of homing pigeons. But every attempt to persuade Morgan and Dapplegray to use it came to nothing. Morgan, in fact, attacked the substitute nest as if it were a rival and eventually Dapplegray laid two white eggs on the meager pile of twigs under the eaves. One rolled out almost immediately. The other, incubated by both parents, hatched in about three weeks.
The fledgling appeared healthy and Morgan and Dapplegray were attentive to its needs. It was, nevertheless, doomed, its fate having been decided at the time Morgan refused to accept the substitute nest. Dapplegray’s flimsy cluster of sticks had been fairly adequate as an incubator; as a nursery it wasn’t. Fledglings develop at a very rapid rate. In order to carry this increasing weight, their legs must grow correspondingly strong and they can’t do this without proper support in the nest.
As soon as Morgan and Dapplegray became aware that their offspring was crippled they abandoned it. The Hylands made an attempt to feed the little creature themselves and when that failed they took it to the Museum of Natural History, where the trouble was explained to them. The fledgling was straddle-legged and would not survive.