CHAPTER LIIIWORMS
Ifyour hawk is ever pulling out the feathers from her breast, and thighs, and stomach, and has done so since she was young, and even after moulting has not forsaken the practice, know that the habit has become second nature to her, and is incurable. You must put up with this foulness in her, and fly her as she is. Do not, however, let her ever get too hungry; for in hunger she will pull out her feathers all the more. She is like one who has contracted the habit of always toying with his beard and moustache and pulling out the hairs: some men, too, I have seen who have a habit of ever plucking out the hair from their chests, and their armpits, and their pubes. Your hawk is like one of those and cannot be cured.
If, however, she has newly acquired the habit, it is a symptom of worms in the stomach.[721]Treatment: if a long-winged hawk, give her sal-ammoniac and sugar-candy, as previously described; but if a short-winged hawk give her, on alternate days, a few doses of manna. Perhaps the worms will be got rid of by this simple purging.Item: give her onenuk͟hūdof asafœtida, and by degrees increase the amount daily till you have reached fivenuk͟hūd, so that she may void the worms either by vomiting or by purging.Item: rub gall and tobacco-water on the spots whence she plucks the feathers, and she will be cured:—
Give your hawk the medicine bitter;Then the good result ascribe,With a highly sweetened temper,To the drug she did imbibe.
Give your hawk the medicine bitter;Then the good result ascribe,With a highly sweetened temper,To the drug she did imbibe.
Give your hawk the medicine bitter;Then the good result ascribe,With a highly sweetened temper,To the drug she did imbibe.
Give your hawk the medicine bitter;
Then the good result ascribe,
With a highly sweetened temper,
To the drug she did imbibe.
Item: pluck out all the feathers from the spot at which she worries, till the bare flesh shows. Mix a little Armenian bole with wine and old vinegar, and apply it. Fatten her up. Please God she will be cured. I myself have proved this receipt.[722]
FOOTNOTES:[721]K͟hazīna.[722]VideLatham’sThe Falcon’s Lure and Cure, Book I, Part II, Chap. xlii, for a receipt: “To kill the ranckness and itching that sometimes will be in Hawkes bloody feathers, which is the cause she pulls them forth in that estate.†The disease referred to is not uncommon in cage birds that are carelessly tended, but I have never met with it in trained hawks in India.
[721]K͟hazīna.
[721]K͟hazīna.
[722]VideLatham’sThe Falcon’s Lure and Cure, Book I, Part II, Chap. xlii, for a receipt: “To kill the ranckness and itching that sometimes will be in Hawkes bloody feathers, which is the cause she pulls them forth in that estate.†The disease referred to is not uncommon in cage birds that are carelessly tended, but I have never met with it in trained hawks in India.
[722]VideLatham’sThe Falcon’s Lure and Cure, Book I, Part II, Chap. xlii, for a receipt: “To kill the ranckness and itching that sometimes will be in Hawkes bloody feathers, which is the cause she pulls them forth in that estate.†The disease referred to is not uncommon in cage birds that are carelessly tended, but I have never met with it in trained hawks in India.