94 INDIAN PIGEONS AND DOVES 
The nest is the usual Pigeon’s nest of twigs, more or less interlaced so 
as to form a platform with a rough and extremely shallow depression in the 
centre. In size the nest may be anything from eight inches to a foot across, 
and in depth one to three inches according to the site in which it is built. I 
have never seen any lining to these nests, but Colonel Bingham, writing 
about a nest found in Thoungyeen, notes: “ On the 19th March, on the road 
from the village of Podresakai to Meplay, I found a nest of the above Pigeon 
with the usual solitary egg, which proved to be hard set. It was easily seen 
from below through the flimsy nest of a few sticks and straws laid across and 
across a horizontally growing bamboo, where a smaller shoot had forked out 
from it.” 
Inglis also mentions a nest consisting “of a very few sticks and a few 
stiff grasses”; but this admixture of grass with the twigs must be very 
exceptional, for in some forty or fifty nests which have come under my obser- 
vation I can remember but one such, and Bingham, describing four other 
nests found by him, says that they were mere platforms of twigs without a 
semblance of lining. 
The great majority of nests are built upon small saplings at a height 
of ten to twenty-five feet from the ground, but I have taken them occasionally 
from high, heavily-foliaged trees, such as the banyan and pepul, at a height 
of over forty feet. Occasionally, also, they may be placed in bamboo-clumps, 
but though two or three such nests have been reported to me, I have never 
seen any so placed. 
The tree selected is one generally placed in fairly thick forest, but close 
to, or on the borders of some opening, either natural, such as a river-bed or 
open glade, or artificial, such as caused by a road or a piece of cultivated 
ground. On the other hand they are sometimes placed on a tree well in the 
interior of evergreen-forest and far removed from all civilization. 
I have not found it breeding over 3,500 ft., and very seldom over 
2,500 ft., its usual breeding-grounds being from the level of the plains up to 
some 1,500 or 2,000 ft. 
Invariably but one egg is laid, white, of course, and elliptical in shape, 
a few specimens being met with which have one or both ends a little pointed. 
The texture is very close and fine with a hard compact surface and sometimes 
a slight gloss. In size they average 1.78 in. by 1.28 ( = 45.2 by 32.4 mm.), 
and the greatest length and breadth is respectively 2.03 in. ( = 51.5 mm.) 
by 1.48 in. ( = 37.6 mm.), and the least both ways 1.68 in. ( = 42.6 mm.) by 
1.23 ( = 31.2 mm.). 
The four eggs in the British Museum vary in length from 1.6 in. to 1.85 
and in breadth from 1.25 in. to 1.32, but the smallest of these must be quite 
abnormally small. 
This is a bird of hills and plains alike, being found throughout the 
latter wherever there is forest, in Madras, Bengal, Assam, and Burma, 
and ascending the former up to at least 6,000 ft. It is perhaps most 
common in the foot-hills of mountain-ranges and the broken grounds 
and plains immediately adjoining them up to some 3,000 ft. in the 
mountains themselves, though many observers do not give them credit 
for going higher up than 1,000 or 1,500 ft. 
They are not very gregarious birds, though, of course, they collect 
in large numbers when attracted by the fruit of any special tree or trees. 
