BENGAL GREEN PIGEON 17 
several consecutive shots at the Bengal Green Pigeon, I was inclined 
to shoot behind the smaller birds unless I remembered this fact. 
All Green Pigeons have the habit of clapping their wings over 
their backs when first taking to flight, and it may sometimes be heard 
when the birds dip in their flight and then suddenly rise again. 
Always, I believe, it is to be heard just as the birds commence to rise 
and not, as with domestic Pigeons, at other times of their flight ; also, 
in the Green Pigeon, the sound is not so startlingly loud as it is when 
made by the birds of the genera Columba and Turtur. 
The food of the Bengal Green Pigeon is, of course, entirely 
vegetarian, and principally frugivorous, and above all it seems to 
delight in the fruit of the various species of Ficus. The gapes of all 
Pigeons are large for the size of the bird, besides being soft and very 
elastic, otherwise it would be almost incredible the size of the fruit 
they can swallow. Plums and similar hard fruit they swallow whole, 
and often these are as large as the bird’s head, only two or three 
being containable in the crop at the same time. Larger and 
soft fruit, such as figs, they tear to pieces, pulling off great lumps 
which they swallow whole. They are very greedy, and their digestion 
is extremely rapid, so that they are able to indulge their appetite, and 
the amount these birds will eat is enormous. In confinement they 
consume almost any sort of grain, and I once shot a pair out of an 
Indian cornfield whose crops were full of the ripe, but still soft, 
maize. Whether these birds were feeding on the ground or not, it 
was impossible to say, but probably they were climbing about on the 
maize stems and tearing the grains from the growing cobs, though there 
were at the time a good many of these latter lying on the ground. 
My birds in captivity ate plantains greedily and would also eat 
the inside of oranges, invariably picking out the pips first before 
eating the fleshy part. Peaches and apricots they also ate, swallowing 
even the stone—kernel, shell and all, complete. In addition to fruit 
and grain they also ate a certain amount of green food such as lettuce, 
and once I saw a bird pulling some green shoots of rice which had just 
sprouted up in the corner of the aviary. They were also partial to 
bread and milk. 
