BLUE ROCK-PIGEON 131 
the wing varied from 8.3 in. to 9.7 in. The series in the British Museum, 
a singularly poor one as regards typical birds, varies between 8.2 in. 
( = 208.2 mm.) and 9.05 in. (229.8 mm.). Weight 8 to 12 oz. 
Adult female. Similar to the male. 
Colours of soft parts. As in the male. 
Measurements. The female is a rather smaller bird than the male, with 
a wing-measurement averaging about .3 in. (7.6 mm.) less. It is also a good 
deal more slender and lighter in weight. Weight 7 to 93 oz. 
Young male. ‘Duller in coloration, and having the black bands on 
the wing less clearly defined and with but little of the green gloss on the 
neck ” (Salvadori). 
Nestling, in the downy stage, is covered with a yellow, or pale yellow- 
buff down. 
Distribution. ‘‘The Western Palaearctic region, with Afghanistan, 
Baluchistan, Sind, the Punjab, Kashmir, and occasionally other parts of 
India ” (Blanford). 
A careful examination of such data as we have on record, together with 
the skins available in the British Museum and elsewhere, induce me to make 
rather a drastic curtailment in the above definition of the area of the western 
form of the Blue Rock-Pigeon in the East. 
In the collection in the British Museum, including Hume’s collection, 
there are but two specimens which could be held to be true livia: these are 
two birds collected in Ladak, the one by Henderson on the 18th of October, 
1890, and the second by Strachey on the Ist of January, 1880, and even in 
these two birds the white band is narrower than is normal in western birds 
and in one also it is slightly, though faintly, suffused with grey. Nearest 
to these is a third bird collected by Hume in Sind: in this the white is less 
than an inch broad and as the collection contains eight birds from the same 
locality, all typical intermedia, it looks as if this bird was individually aberrant 
or a reversion to the orig’nal white-rumped stock of the West. Another 
specimen labelled livia from Jhelam is really intermediate between livia and 
intermedia and nearer the latter than the former. Cripps’s specimen from 
Furredpore is almost a typical livia though the normal bird of this district is 
quite as typically true intermedia, and here again I look upon this as an 
individual aberration or reversion. Specimens from Mesopotamia are inclined 
to livia, and one such is almost a typical bird of that subspecies, though 
others are quite typical intermedia. 
When we work through northern Africa, from Tunis eastwards to Egypt, 
and thence through Palestine, north Arabia and Persia, we find a form very 
closely allied to intermedia, if not identical with it, which has been named 
gymnocyclus by G. R. Gray, schimperi by Bonaparte (1854), and lately (1912) 
palestinae by Graf Zedlitz, and before that (in 1874), neglecta by Hume, 
and spelaea by Hutton (1873) (in a letter to Hume). Salvadori describes this 
species, or subspecies (schimperi) as similar to C. livia, but lighter, and with 
the rump light grey like the back, not white; the area of habitat he gives as 
Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine. Birds, however, from Tunis in the west and 
Arabia in the east are identical, and these, again, I find it difficult to 
separate from our north-west Indian livia intermedia. Throughout Europe 
and north-west Asia and Asia Minor, all the specimens I have seen are 
typical livia. 
From the material available, therefore, I think it would be difficult to 
prove that typical C. livia livia ever comes within our Indian limits, except 
K 2 
