138 INDIAN PIGEONS AND DOVES 
some birds breeding in was a collection of deep borrow-pits beside the main 
road leading into the town of Krishnagar, and this was the more strange in 
that there was an abundance of masonry buildings of all kinds, old and new, 
within a very few hundred yards of where they were nesting. 
They breed in colonies, often very large ones, and I know of no instance 
of single nests being found. The nest itself is the usual untidy platform 
of dry twigs, but much mixed with a good deal of rubbish, such as straw from 
cattle-bedding, grass, and the accumulation of feathers from countless 
generations of birds. They make use of the same nest for several broods, 
and I think, almost certainly, for many consecutive years, so that as might 
be expected, they get into a filthy state, and are full of vermin. 
Many years ago, when I was stationed in Nadia, some two hundred 
pairs of these Pigeons bred in the roof of a very old police-station in that 
district. This roof consisted of an upper stone-slab one, and a lower false 
one of bricks with a gap between the two of some four feet, in which the birds 
placed their nests, finding entry by the holes left for ventilation. As this 
was a part of India where the birds were not held sacred, I forced an entry 
into the roof and inspected the nests, the owners of which had left in a panic- 
stricken crowd prior to the commencement of my housebreaking operations. 
There must have been from fifty to sixty nests in this place, some in groups 
of five or six all huddled together, others a few feet apart from any other, 
but all alike were in a filthy condition, and the material looked as if it must 
have been collected there by many generations previously, each generation 
merely adding its quota of feathers and insects and a little dirty straw 
collected from a cattle-byre a few yards away. 
In spite of the close proximity of their nests to one another, in none 
did I find more than two eggs or squabs, nor have I personally ever seen 
more than two such, but Fergusson, Inglis, and others have taken three 
eggs from the same nest, so it may be that this Pigeon does occasionally 
lay three eggs, or, and this is more likely, two birds may lay their eggs 
in the same nest. 
As far as I can ascertain, there is as yet no recorded instance of this 
Pigeon ever making its nest on a tree: invariably they place the nest in a 
hole of some kind in masonry, or cave or crevice in a cliff, in a hole in an 
earthen wall or bank, or in some underground tunnel or cutting, but never 
have they, previous to this, been known to make their nest in a tree. The 
finding, therefore, of two such nests is a most interesting fact. 
Captain C. R. §. Pitman, the finder of these two nests, writes to me 
about them, in epistola, as follows: “On 16th July, 1913, I found this 
Pigeon still breeding amongst the precipitous cliffs and craggs of the Girni 
Sar (5,880 ft.), a ridge of hills in independent territory across the administrative 
border to the north of the Derajat District. I found a lot of egg shells lying 
about in the nullahs below the cliffs where the ‘ Blue Rocks’ swarmed and 
on one occasion I saw a Pigeon fly into the cliff and a few minutes afterwards 
she came out again and threw down the egg shells from which her nestlings 
had apparently just hatched out. I also found two nests placed in wild-fig 
trees in a nullah full of rushes and grass. 
“Both nests were quite massive constructions of sticks and twigs lined 
with finer material and dead grass. One was placed among the thin top 
branches about 18 ft. from the ground and contained two smooth white 
glossy eggs on the point of hatching. The other was placed in a stout branch 
12 ft. from the ground and contained two young ones about ten days old; 
these latter had seeds and small bits of grain in their crops !!” 
