awling, soft and wobbly baby dove within
the nest.

The father and mother of him would still have much to do, it seems; for
hatching a dove out of an egg is only the easier half of the task. The
wobbly baby must be brought up to become a dove of grace and beauty.
That would take food.

But you must not think to see Sire and Dame Dove come flying home with
seeds or nuts or fruit or grain or earthworms or insects in their beaks.
What else, then, could they bring? Well, nothing at all, indeed, in
their beaks; for the food of a baby dove requires especial preparation.
It has to be provided for him in the crop of his parent. So Dame Dove
would come with empty beak but full crop, and the baby would be fed.
Just exactly how, I have not seen written by those people who saw a
million Passenger Pigeons. Perhaps they did not stop to notice.

However, if you will watch a tame pigeon feed its young, you can guess
how a wild one would do it. A tame mother-pigeon that I am acquainted
with comes to her young (_she_ has two) and, standing in or beside the
nest, opens her beak very wide. One of her babies reaches up as far as
he can stretch his neck and puts his beak inside his mother's mouth. He
tucks it in at one side and crowds in his head as far as he can push it.
Then the mother makes a sort of pumping motion, and pumps up soft baby
food from her crop, and he swallows it. Sometimes he keeps his beak in
his mother's mouth for as long as five minutes; and if anything startles
her and she pulls away, the hungry little fellow scolds and whines and
whimpers in a queer voice, and reaches out with his teasing wings, and
flaps them against her breast, stretching up with his beak all the while
and feeling for a chance to poke his head into her mouth again. And
often, do you know, his twin sister gets her beak in one side of Mother
Pigeon's mouth while he is feeding at the other side, and Mother just
stands there and pumps and pumps. The two comical little birds, with
feet braced and necks stretched up as far as they can reach, and their
heads crowded as far in as they can push them, look so funny they would
make you laugh to see them. Then, the next meal Father Pigeon feeds them
the same way, usually one at a time, but often both together.

Now, I think, don't you, because that is the way tame Father and Mother
Pigeon serve breakfast and dinner and supper and luncheons in between
whiles to their tame twins, that wild Dame and Sire Dove wo