98 THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 



"doo-cots": for while they are thickly scattered in coast- 

 wise parishes and counties Fife alone 'possessed 360, with 

 36,000 pairs of breeding birds they diminish in numbers 

 with increasing distance from the sea, until in the Highlands 

 they are exceedingly rare. 



If evidence other than the history of the dovecots them- 

 selves were required to show that the Scottish dovecot- 

 pigeon owes its ancestry to the Rock Dove, it is suggested 

 by the fact that Rock Doves are easily tamed. Professor 

 Macgillivray of Aberdeen has recorded that he completely 

 tamed a Rock Dove in the Hebrides; Darwin relates that 

 there are several records of those pigeons having bred 

 in dovecots in the Shetland Islands, and that for more than 

 twenty years Colonel King of Hythe kept in his dovecot 

 the progeny of young wild birds taken in the Orkney Islands. 



The dovecot pigeons themselves give good evidence of 

 their ancestry, for they bear close resemblance to the wild 

 species, and although they vary in the darkness of their 

 plumage and in the size and thickness of their bill, they do 

 so little more than Colonel King's Rock Doves did after 

 twenty years of dovecot life. Further, although many of 

 them have chequered wings due to the presence of large 

 dark spots on the sides of each feather, in this respect they 

 exactly resemble a chequered variety of the Rock Dove 

 which occurs in Orkney and Islay. 



In view of the interest of this primitive domesticated 

 pigeon, I may be permitted to give a short account of its 

 significance in Scotland, based mainly upon a paper by 

 Mr Bruce Campbell in the Transactions of the Edinburgh 

 Field Naturalists' Society. 



When the Rock Dove first became a "Doo-cot" Pigeon 

 it is impossible to say, but by the fifteenth century the 

 pigeon-house was valuable enough to be reckoned along with 

 "cunningares" or rabbit-warrens, as deserving the protection 

 of the law. So it was ordained in 1424 that breakers of 



mennes Orchardes, steallers of frute, destroyers of Cunningaires and Dow- 

 cattes...sall paie fourtie shillings to the King for the unlaw and assyith 

 [indemnify] the partie skaithed [harmed]. 



But if the breaking of the doo-cot was one sin the taking of 

 "ony foules of utheris Dowcattes" was another, and was 

 "to be punished as thieft" (1474). 



