NO. 9 BIRDS OF ISLA COIBA, PANAMA—WETMORE 35 
was short, or where it grew in scattered tufts on stony soil. As I 
approached the doves crouched motionless until I had passed; or if 
I came too near, they rose quickly with a flash of bright reddish brown 
from their wings, often to perch on shaded branches in the small, 
scattered trees in these locations. I heard them calling occasionally, 
and January 11 flushed a female from a nest placed 6 feet from the 
ground on the summit of a tree stump standing in the border of 
swampy woodland. The nest was a flat, fairly well-built platform of 
twigs, hidden among tall, green shoots sprouting from the top of 
the stump. The two eggs were white, bluntly ovate in form, and 
measured 22x 16.9 and 22.2x16.9 mm. The following day a con- 
vict brought me another nest with two eggs that he had found in 
the top of a palm while gathering coconuts, but these were nearly 
ready to hatch, and could not be saved. 
On the Pacific slope of Panama these doves prefer open lands. 
They enter thickets or groves readily, but usually do not penetrate 
forested areas beyond the immediate borders. The pastures cleared 
around the convict camps are definitely favorable to them so it is 
apparent that they must be more common now than formerly, when 
they were restricted to the borders of the swamps and the shoreline. 
At present this species is the only common bird in the man-made 
environment of these pasturelands, which are frequented otherwise 
only by kingbirds except along their borders. Two males and two 
females were prepared for specimens. 
On comparing these birds with others, it was noted immediately 
that the females were definitely darker on the lower surface than 
the mainland series; and also that they agreed in this darker color 
with skins from San José and Pedro Gonzalez Islands in the Archi- 
piélago de las Perlas, which represent the race named nesophila by 
Todd. It is highly interesting to note this resemblance between the 
Coiba population and that of this other island group. Bangs ® stated 
that Todd’s type of nesophila, from “San Miguel” (Isla El Rey) was 
an immature male with the sex wrongly marked as female by the 
collector, and therefore placed nesophila in the synonymy of C. t. 
rufipennis, in which he has been followed by Peters and by Hellmayr 
and Conover. However, in 1944 when I secured four females from 
the Perlas Islands I found that these clearly upheld the validity of 
Todd’s race.? An occasional immature bird from the mainland, 
freshly molted from juvenal plumage, may approach nesophila in 
6 Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., vol. 70, 1930, p. 165. 
7 See Wetmore, Smithsonian Misc. Coll., vol. 106, No. 1, Aug. 5, 1946, pp. 
36-37. 
