406 BULLETIN" 16 2, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



Mrs. Nice's articles form an exhaustive study of the nesting habits 

 of the mourning dove and contain many statistical data of the utmost 

 interest. Readers are referred to these valuable articles for detailed 

 information. 



That the division of labor, with a well-ordered time for relieving 

 each other on the nest, continues through the incubation period and 

 during the 15 days that the young spend in the nest, is shown by 

 the following extracts. Wallace Craig (1911) says: 



Male and female take regular daily turns in sitting on the eggs or young: 

 the female sits from evening till morning, the male from morning till evening, 

 the exchanges taking place usually about 8.30 a. m. and 4.30 p. m. This 

 arrangement is very regular if there is nothing to disturb the birds ; but if 

 interloping birds come about, this arouses the anger of the male and he leaves 

 the nest in order to attack them. 



Mrs. Nice's (1923) experience corroborates Doctor Craig's observa- 

 tion. She says: 



The male incubates and broods during the day while the female does the 

 same during the night, early morning, and late afternoon ; and both parents 

 regurgitate " pigeon milk " for the young. Two striking differences between 

 the nest behavior of mourning doves and most passerine birds is the almost 

 constant brooding of the young till near the end of the nest life and the lack 

 of any sanitary care of the nest. 



And further (1922) : 



As a rule one or the other parent is continuously on the nest from the time 

 the first egg is laid until the young are fairly well grown. 



I have approached the nest of a mourning dove and come almost 

 within arm's reach of the bird before it flew quietly away, but there 

 is plenty of evidence that this behavior is not invariable for fre- 

 quently the bird is reported to flop from the nest and resort to the 

 ruse of the broken wing. 



The breeding season is very long; in the Middle States it lasts 

 from May to August and rarely to early September. The birds 

 commonly rear two broods in a season, and Miss A. R. Sherman 

 believes that they probably rear three sometimes. In her notes Miss 

 Sherman says in substance : 



The doves are so numerous and so secretive in their ways that it is not possible 

 to say whether a pair of birds, which has nested in May or June, breed again 

 late in June or in July. When a nest is used twice in the same season, 

 however, the assumption is that a pair of birds is using their own nest a 

 second time. 



[Author's note : On April 19, 1907, while hunting for hawks' nests 

 in a grove of tall pines, I rapped on a tree containing a likely looking 

 old nest and was surprised to see a mourning dove fly from it. I 

 climbed to it, more than 40 feet up in a white pine, and found it to 

 be an old hawk's nest, that had since been used by squirrels, as it 



