394 BULLETIN" 162, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



a few have cautiously alighted at the mound by the spring, " others 

 follow slowly until, at last, a perfect torrent falls upon the spot, 

 covering it so deeply as to endanger the lives of many of them by 

 suffocation; then the whole enormous body suddenly rises with a 

 deafening roar and alights on the trees. This is repeated until all 

 are satisfied." 



Voice. — Craig (1911a), as a result of intimate studies of captive 

 birds, says : " Its voice was loud and strident, the hard notes being 

 predominant and the musical notes somewhat degenerated; this being 

 probably the result of its living and breeding in colonies so populous 

 that only the loudest sounds could be heard." He gives at consider' 

 able length and, often with the aid of musical notation, the various 

 calls of the bird, which he divides into : " 1. The copulation-note; 2. 

 The keck (a name not used for the note of any other species) ; 3. 

 Scolding, chattering, clucking (these names also peculiar to the 

 species) ; 4. The vestigial coo or keeho; 5. The nest-call." The copu- 

 lation note he considers to be essentially the same as that of the 

 mourning dove. The keck or kheck is loud and harsh, generally 

 given singly, and sometimes it is accompanied with a flapping of 

 the wings. The scolding, chattering, and clucking notes have been 

 written kee-kee-kee-kee and tete! tete! and have been said to re- 

 semble the croaking of wood frogs. " In expressing high excite- 

 ment, it becomes loud and high-pitched, and in the excitement of 

 fighting especially it becomes very rapid." The vestigial coo or keeho 

 was a mere remnant of the coo of other pigeons. " One sees in this," 

 says Craig, " probably an adaptation to life in a community so 

 populous and hence so noisy that cooing could hardly be heard, and 

 the pigeon which could best win a female or warn off an interloper 

 would be the pigeon with the merely loudest voice." The nest call 

 he describes as " very much blurred — more so than any other note 

 of this species. A great mixture of high and low tones." 



Herman Behr (1911) says that feeding birds hailed "newcomers 

 with a call, peculiar to the occasion. It was a long-drawn and moder- 

 ately loud repetition of one note, which sounded like treet, and this 

 would cause the flying birds to alight in nearby trees, giving in their 

 turn a low call, tret, tret, tret. To me these seemed to be notes of 

 greeting, while other sounds were indicative of sex. For instance, 

 the female call note is similar to the treet above, but the male response 

 is a low oorn, which can not be heard farther than two or three hun- 

 dred feet. My knowledge of these notes is due to the fact that I 

 learned to imitate them perfectly, in order to call the birds up within 

 good shooting distance." Maynard (1896) quotes August Koch as 

 describing their note of alarm " sounding something like a laugh 

 made with a child's trumpet." 



