shown in the coloured drawings, and it has further been already 
described. They will vanish beneath the water with startling 
suddenness, and remain below for a surprising length of time ; 
emerging at last far from the spot at which the dive was taken. 
One of the commonest birds of the country-side is the ring- 
dove, or woodpigeon. He is the largest of our pigeons, and may 
further be distinguished by the white half-ring round his neck. 
His flight scarcely needs to be described, for it differs in no essentials 
from the pigeons of our dove-cotes. His courtship flight has 
already been described here. The stock-dove is not quite so 
conspicuous, but may be readily distinguished from the fact that 
the neck has no white patch, while the out-spread wings are 
marked by an imperfect bar of black. It is a bird, by the way, 
which shows a strange diversity of taste in the selection of the 
site for its nursery—a rabbit-burrow, a hole in a tree, an old 
squirrels drey, or the cross-beams in an old church tower! The 
rock-dove haunts deep caverns worn out of the cliffs, both inland 
and on the coast. But one can never be certain that one is 
watching really wild birds. Certain it is that most of the 
*“ rock-doves ” one sees are domesticated birds run wild. This 
is the ancestor of our dove-cote birds, from some of which, 
those with a white rump and two black wing-bars, they cannot be 
distinguished. It is on account of this ancestry that our 
domesticated pigeons never alight in trees. They are inherently 
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