26 Indian Doves. 



Indian Doves. — Doves that are not what they seem. 



By D. Dewar. 



[Reprinted from The Indian Pioneer, January 24, 1923; with 



our thanks and apologies to Editor and Author. — Cutting per 



Capt. G. E. Rattigan, F.Z.S.— Ed. " B.N."] 



In this world things are often not what they seem. 

 Charles Peace had the air of a dissenting minister, and Georges 

 Carpentier has the spiritual look of a poet. Doves are pictures 

 of innocence, harmlessness and guilelessness, but they possess 

 none of these characteristics. Cunningham asserts that they 

 are whited sepulchres of envy, hatred and malice. Whether this 

 summing up of the turturine character be too severe or not, 

 there is no gainsaying the fact that by their guile doves have 

 altogether outwitted men of science. Doves are a standing 

 gibe at the theory of natural selection. If there is anything in 

 that theory, the dove family should have been swept off the 

 face of the earth long ago. The bill and claws of the dove are 

 feeble ; it habitually sits on a telegraph wire or other exposed 

 perch, thereby courting the attacks of birds of prey, it can lay 

 only two eggs, it constructs the most ramshackle nest imagin- 

 able, which it builds in the most impossible and exposed 

 situations, so that the white eggs can be seen from afar. 

 Nevertheless it flourishes like the crow, the sparrow and the 

 myna. Go where you will in India, there will you find doves 

 in their hundreds cooing contentedly. I know of only one 

 attribute of doves to explain their phenomenal success, and that 

 i.5 their doggedness. You cannot depress a dove. Destroy 

 its nest, break its eggs, kill its young, it coos contentedly and 

 proceeds to make another nest and lay two more eggs, and it is 

 apparently prepared to continue the process ad infinitum. In my 

 volume entitled " Birds of the Plains " I have described the 

 doings of a pair of doves which reared a brood in the verandah 

 of the office of the Accountant-General at Lahore after four 

 nests containing eggs or young had been destroyed in 

 succession. 



" PIGEONS' MILK." 

 It may be asked, would it not be better for the dove if its 

 clutch of eggs consisted of five or six instead of but two ? This 



