182 INDIAN PIGEONS AND DOVES 
a boat at a distance of 150 yards, and examine them with binoculars 
almost as well as if they were in the hand, but directly we landed they 
became invisible. With my half-broken back I could not climb, but 
my companion crawled up to the summit. There, at the very roots 
of the trees, on which they were sitting in dozens, though he could 
hear their deep coo, their clattering amongst the leaves as they alighted, 
their fluttering and the whirr of their wings as they flew off, he could 
see nothing. He fired once or twice by the sound, but I do not believe 
the shot ever got through the dense, unbroken, massive sheet of foliage 
that protected them.” 
Davison, like Butler, shot the first bird he obtained seated quite 
close to the ground ; he says: “‘ I know nothing special of the habits of 
this fine species, which seemed to me in every respect an Imperial 
Pigeon. I found the one I shot at Port Moriat sitting on a low branch 
by the side of a forest path ; it was not at all shy, and allowed me to 
get close enough to shoot it with a walking-stick gun. It had swallowed 
several fruits about the size of a walnut, two of them with stalks, about 
two inches long and as thick as a goose quill, attached.” 
Hume seems to have found it comparatively common in Macpherson’s 
Straits, where he saw “numerous small parties ... which repeatedly 
passed over us, flying from the tops of the trees on the hill-slopes on one 
side to similar positions on the other, and, of course, well out of shot. 
One party settled on Bird Island, a tiny precipitous wooded islet, and 
though we could hear their loud deep coo, and from the water’s edge 
watch them feeding, scuffling and making love on the branches of the 
highest central trees, we could see nothing of them, when, with infinite 
trouble we worked a way up to the base of these trees, though we could 
still hear them. 
“‘T have no doubt that this species is a permanent resident of the 
Andamans and Nicobars, moving, as Nicobarica does, from island to 
island, as the different fruits and berries, which constitute the sole food 
of these large Pigeons, ripen.” 
