182 INDIAN PIGEONS AND DOVES 



a boat a* a distance of 150 yards, and examine them with binoculars 

 ahnost as well as if they were in the hand, but directly we landed they 

 became invisible. With my half-broken back I could not climb, but 

 my companion crawled up to the summit. There, at the very roots 

 of the trees, on which they were sitting in dozens, though he could 

 hear their deep coo, their clattering amongst the leaves as they alighted, 

 their fluttering and the whirr of their wings as they flew off, he could 

 see nothing. He fired once or twice by the sound, but I do not believe 

 the shot ever got through the dense, unbroken, massive sheet of foliage 

 that protected them." 



Davison, like Butler, shot the first bird he obtained seated quite 

 close to the ground ; he says : " I know nothing special of the habits of 

 this fine species, which seemed to me in every respect an Imperial 

 Pigeon. I found the one I shot at Port Moriat sitting on a low branch 

 by the side of a forest path ; it was not at all shy, and allowed me to 

 get close enough to shoot it with a walking-stick gmi. It had swallowed 

 several fruits about the size of a walnut, two of them ^^ith stalks, about 

 two inches long and as thick as a goose quill, attached." 



Hume seems to have found it comparatively common in Macpherson's 

 Straits, where he saw " numerous small parties . . . which repeatedly 

 passed over us, flying from the tops of the trees on the hill-slopes on one 

 side to similar positions on the other, and, of course, well out of shot. 

 One party settled on Bird Island, a tiny precipitous wooded islet, and 

 though we could hear their loud deep coo, and from the water's edge 

 watch them feeding, scuffling and making love on the branches of the 

 highest central trees, we could see nothing of them, when, ^vith infinite 

 trouble we worked a way up to the base of these trees, though we could 

 stiU hear them. 



" I have no doubt that this species is a permanent resident of the 

 Andamans and Nicobars, moving, as Nicobarica does, from island to 

 island, as the different fruits and hemes., which constitute the sole food 

 of these large Pigeons, ripen." 



