72 BRITISH BIRDS, THEIR EGGS AND NESTS. 



149. TURTLE DOVE (Columba turtnr.) 

 Turtle, Common Turtle, Ring-necked Turtle, Wrekin Dove. 

 Only a summer visitor and not a regular inhabitant, like its three 

 predecessors. It is long since, living where I do, I have heard its 

 sweet, plaintive note. No one but one who loves birds and their 

 ways can tell how real a deprivation it is to live for ^cars out of 

 sound of the sweet and familiar voices of such as are only local, 

 the Nightingale for instance, the Turtle, and many others. The 

 male ^Hrtle Dove is a very handsome bird, but much shier and 

 more retiring at breeding-time than the Ring Dove. The nest is 

 a slight platform of sticks, easily permitting the sky^ to be seen 

 through it from below, and usually placed high up in a holly, a 

 thick bush in a wood, in the branches of a fir, or the lesser fork of 

 some limb of an oak or other forest tree. As with the other 

 Doves, the eggs are two in number, quite white, about l inch 

 long, by | broad. 



150. PASSENGER PIGEON (Ectopistes migratorius). 



Every bird-loving boy, beyond doubt, has heard of this Pigeon, 

 and the inconceivable vastness of the flocks in which they pass 

 from one distant district to another in America. Here it is only 

 a casual visitor, and can lawfully lay claim to none of our limited 

 space. 



II. PHASIANIDJE. 

 151. PHEASANT (Phasianm Colchicus). 



I dare say " a good few" of our readers if they were asked, 

 " Do you know the Pheasant ?" might answer, " Yes, very well. 

 We had some for dinner, such and such a day." And I have no 

 doubt the acquaintance was satisfactory enough at least to one 

 of the parties. The Pheasant does not pair, and on the preserved 

 estates in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire I have frequently seen in 

 the spring large groups of Cock Pheasants collected and con- 

 sorting together without the intermixture of a single hen. In a 

 vast many places now an artificial system of Pheasant-breeding 

 is adopted, three or four hens with one male being turned into a 

 large pled " apartment," well netted in, the whole establishment 

 comprising many such apartments. Each hen lays double or 

 treble the number of eggs she would if suffered to run wild, and 

 these are collected daily and placed under hens ready to sit as soon 

 as a sufficient number is got together. In this way twice or 

 three times the number of young ones is secured from one hen as 

 compared with her own greatest success in bringing off a brood 

 in the woods. In her wild state, the Pheasant makes scarcely 

 any nest, on the ground, and lays ten or twelve eggs, of a uniform 

 pale olive-brown shade. Not only are cases in which two Pheasants 



