8 INDIAN PIGEONS AND DOVES 
darker at the base; legs and feet bright chrome-yellow, sometimes almost 
orange-yellow, but never red or pink ; iris with two rings of colour, the inner 
blue and the outer ranging from pink to bright crimson. 
Length about 13 to 14 in. (= 330 to 355 mm.) ; wing 7.25 to 7.80 in. 
(= 184 to 200 mm.), average of sixty-three birds 7.42 in. (= 188.4 mm.); 
tail about 4.5 in. (= 114.3) varying a good deal in length ; bill at front about 
75 (=19.0 mm.) or a little over, and from gape a little over 1 in. (=25.4 mm.) ; 
tarsus about 1 in. (= 25.4 mm.). 
Young males of the year have the colour of the plumage rather less vivid, 
and the lilac-purple of the wing-coverts absent until after the first moult. 
They also average a good deal smaller, with a wing often as little as 7 in. 
(= 177.8 mm.) and seldom over 7.2 in. (= 182.8 mm.). 
Adult female. The female only differs from the male in degree of colour- 
ing, and a brightly-coloured female cannot be distinguished from a young or 
dully-coloured male. As a rule the lilac on the wing is less in extent and 
duller in colour; the definition between the grey of the abdomen and the 
yellow of the breast is not so clear; the under tail-coverts also have the 
chestnut paler and less in extent and sometimes mixed with dark grey, 
whilst the pale edges are correspondingly broader. 
Length from 12 to 13 in. ( = 304.8 to 330 mm.) with a wing of 7.1 to 
7.32 in. (= 180.3 to 185.9 mm.), the average of forty birds bemg 7.23 in. 
(= 173.6 mm.). The bill, tarsus and tail are all proportionately slightly 
smaller than in the male. 
Distribution. The Bengal Green Pigeon is found throughout Bengal 
and Behar up to the Himalayas and into Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan; west 
it extends throughout the United Provinces and Oudh as far west as the 
Jumna, and Butler (Stray Feathers, IV) records it from Gujerat. It occurs 
in Central India and also in northern Orissa, but in the south of these 
presidencies it is replaced by chlorogaster, being found together with that 
form over much of its north-western range. To the extreme north-east it 
extends as far as Sadiya in Assam, birds from Dibrugarh, both north and 
south of the Brahmapootra, being typical phoenicopterus. In the Naga Hills, 
Khasia, and north Cachar Hills, we still get fairly typical phoenicopterus, 
with here and there a bird more like wiridifrons, but south of these ranges 
we find it overlaps with the eastern form; birds from south Cachar, 
Hylakandy and Sylhet being more or less intermediate though nearer 
viridifrons than phoenicopterus, whilst birds from Chittagong are typical 
specimens of the former subspecies. 
Nidification. Green Pigeons are early breeders and commence to 
build very early in March, laying in the end of that month, and continuing 
to do so up to June, whilst I have also known eggs laid occasionally as late 
as the end of August. Their courtship, with its attendant attitudes and 
“ showing off,” is much the same as that of the domestic and all other Pigeons, 
but as far as has been recorded hitherto, the attitudinizing never takes place 
on the ground. The male bird puffs out his throat and breast, lowers his 
wings, and ruffles out his feathers—and then prances solemnly up and down 
a branch, continually bowing his head and whistling softly as he makes his 
way backwards and forwards, to and from the lady he imagines he is 
captivating. Unlike most birds, the female does seem occasionally to admire 
the display of the male and, if not feeding, will sometimes respond to the 
extent of warbling out a few liquid notes and doing a minor “ skirt-dance ” 
on her own account. 
