Pigeons in a rabbit warren

Light Jackstone

In the fall of 1978 I accidentally started  my career as a pigeon fancier. I had to blame it on my youngest son Jerome. One memorable day he turned up with a couple of ugly young pigeons which he had got as a present from his playmate’s father. We already possessed two rabbits joyfully living in a hutch mainly built  of wire netting and old timber work. 

Deep below the surface of the earth their accommodation  has been separated from the rest of the free world with chicken-wire.  I wasn’t  at all pleased when I saw my son with these pigeons.  I  was upset and asked:  ’What are you going to do with those useless creatures’

 ‘Well, they can live with Jim and Wilma’, he answered  with an appealing look.

‘Then they‘ll have no shelter, you expose them to all sorts of weather’, I protested

‘We can do with birds, can’t we, they are used to living in the open’, he pleaded.

So  he had his way. In a poultry run where you had to bend at a height of 60 centimetres two breeding cages were attached to the netting. On the others side of  Jerome’s fantasy building  the pigeons got their  front door.  There still was a problem left. Dark  and Light Jackstone as Jerome had christened the two innocent pigeons by name were cocks and  sooner or later  they would be in need of female companionship.  

Therefore my dear son bought two hens in a  nearby poultry market. And now the happy  animal family life in  his little zoo could begin.   

The Jackstones and theirs beloved hens embarked on a breeding session and Wilma and Jim  deep  and far away in one of their dark burrows welcomed their offspring.  In the walking Jerome enlarged  his little community with two guinea pigs.   

After Dark Jack and his partner had been breeding for a while my son came home with a huge egg. Which  he claimed  to have found somewhere in the middle of nowhere. He slipped it  in the nest under Jack’s hen.  To his surprise She accepted without batting an eyelid the queer thing. 

No  single trace of embarrassment. No, Dark Jackstone and his wife  did adopt the giant egg without hesitation. It was their egg and that was that.

Two weeks after a duckling hatched. It immediately made it  loudly squeaking obvious that it had entered into the big world. Jerome’s pigeon couple regarded that  strange  creature in their nest as their young and they tried to feed it in the pigeon way. However that didn’t work. Young duck leave their nest  and are self-supporting by nature.

Jerome in his rabbitwarren

In the afternoon our day-old chick jumped or rather tumbled down from the breeding box and minutes later it strolled  around amongst the rabbits, guinea pigs and other pigeons that didn’t seem to pay any attention to this busy squeaking  new inhabitant of their rabbit hill.  Our ugly duckling ate everything; pigeon food,  stale bread and even rabbit droppings. So she enjoyed the good life and after that tasty meal she went for a swim in the pigeons drinking fountain.

Jackstone still  attempted to feed his foster child in the typical pigeon way. He nervously tripped   around unthankful duck.

Towards the end of the day our duckling started  to squeak in a complaining voice. It was tired and in need of  a warm nest. So  Jerome took it back into the breeding box, where it crawled close to its foster pigeon hen and then soon fell asleep.

And  from that time onwards that became a  regular habit. During daytime the little duck  threw herself from the nest into the interesting rabbit world  and  somewhere in the afternoon my son gently lifted her up to  the pigeon nursery. Occasionally she was allowed to go for as stroll outside the rabbit warren accompanied by one of us.

As far as the pigeons concerned; they didn’t seem to notice the difference  between an extravagant egg and one of their own. At first they even regarded that new born chicken their own child.

In our childhood we looted the nests of magpies. A magpie nest mostly contained 5-7 eggs. When  we’d climbed a high tree and there only were 2 or 3 eggs my schoolboy friend with whom I was on  what we called an egg raid replaced these eggs with small potatoes. 

In this way we didn’t disturb the magpies breeding session and after a couple of days we came back to collect the other eggs which mother magpie in between had produced.  In doing so maybe  we discovered  that birds  probably didn’t  see the difference in shape, colour and size.   

The teacher at school had told us the interesting story of the Cuckoo and the songbirds.  But he also then tried to convince us that robbing birds nests was more or less immoral.   

the little duck goes for a walk

No doubt you wish to know how Jerome’s  duck and pigeon story ended.  In the beginning it was a happy affair.  Except from the guinea pigs who didn’t really socialize, pigeons, rabbits and duck lived peaceful together. Every now and then the duck went underground and also some pigeons occasionally  dropped by in a rabbit burrow. Jerome joined as a junior member the local pigeon club, Pro Patria by name. And on their first races from Belgium to their rabbit loft  Light  and Dark Jackstone were amazingly successful.

The little duck however never became fully fledged; it wasn’t destined to be a beautiful swan. Maybe she took  bad food or got infected by some horrible pigeon disease. In short one Monday morning it fell ill and eventually died. 

©c.u 
 zie voor het verhaal in het Nederlands http://duivenpad.blogspot.nl/2011/09/duiven-in-de-konijnenberg.html