How a Pigeon Made Love to a Bottle.

Te Aroha News, Volume 1, Issue 47, 26 April 1884, Page 5

How a Pigeon Made Love to a Bottle.

A white fantail pigeon lived -with his family in a pigeon-house in our .stable-yard. Ho and his wife had boon brought originally from Sussex, and had H\ed, respected and admired, to sco their children of the thiicl generation, ■when he .suddenly became the victim ot the infatuation lam about, to describe. . . . No cecentiirity was remarked in Ins conduct uniil one day I chanced to pick up somewhere in the gaulen a ginj;erbeor bottle of the ordinal y brown stone description. 1 Hung: it in the yard, whore it fell immediately below the pigionhouse. That instant down flew paterfamilias, and to my no small astonishment commenced a series of genuflexions, evidently doing homage to the bottle. Ho strutted round and round it, bowing and scraping and cooing and performing the most ludicrous antics I ever beheld on the part of an enamoured pigeon Nor did he cease these performances until we removed the bottle ; and, which proved that this singular aberration of instinct had become a fixed delusion, whencvei the bottle was thrown or placed in the yard — no matter whether it lay horizontally 01 was placed upright- the same ridiculous scene was enacted ; at that moment the pigeon came flying down with quite as great alacrity as when his peas were thrown out for his dinner, to continue his antics as long as the bottle lemained there. Sometimes this would go on for hours, the other members ot his family treating Ins movement- wiih the most contemptuous inditlbrence, and taking no notice whatever of the bottle. At last it became the regular amusement with which we entertained our visitors toseo thi.s erratic pigeon making love to the inteleating object of his affection^, and it was an entertainment which never failed, throughout that summer at leaft. Before next summer came round he was no more.— Letter from a lady, quoted in .Romanes's "Evolution in Animals."