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antiquity. I have associated with several eminent fanciers, and have been permitted to join two of the London Pigeon Clubs. The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing. Compare the English carrier and the short-faced tumbler, and see the wonderful
in their beaks, entailing corresponding differences in their skulls. The carrier, more especially the male bird, is also remarkable from the wonderful development of the carunculated skin about the
and this is accompanied by greatly elongated eyelids, very large external orifices to the nostrils, and a wide gape of mouth. The short-faced tumbler has a beak in outline almost like that of a finch; and the common tumbler has the singular
inherited habit of flying at a great height in a compact flock, and tumbling in the air head over heels. The runt is a bird of great size, with
massive beak and large feet; some of the sub-breeds of runts have very long necks, others very long wings and tails, others singularly short tails. The barb is allied to the carrier, but, instead of a
long beak, has a very short and
broad one. The pouter has a much elongated body, wings, and legs; and its enormously developed crop, which it glories in inflating, may well excite astonishment and even laughter. The turbit has a
short and conical beak, with a line of reversed feathers down the breast; and it has the habit of continually
the upper part of the œsophagus. The Jacobin has the feathers so much reversed along the back of the neck that they form a
and it has, proportionally to its size,
elongated wing and tail feathers. The trumpeter and laugher, as their names express, utter a very different coo from the other breeds. The fantail has thirty or even forty
instead of twelve or
normal number in all
of the great pigeon
these feathers are kept expanded, and are carried
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