62 THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA 



seeds for their afternoon meal." Beal's (1904) often quoted birds 

 l:ad the prize appetites ; one had eaten 6,400 seeds of barngrass or 

 foxtail, another 7,500 seeds of yellow wood-sorrel and a third 

 9,200miscellaneous weed seeds. No wonder the authorities consider 

 the mourning dove a highly beneficial bird. 



IN CAPTIVITY 

 The best substitute for pigeon milk for young doves that we 

 could think of was bread and milk ; we stuffed this down the 

 throats of the unwilling victims until they learned to eat it them- 

 selves. We continued giving them bread and milk for most of 

 the time that we kept them. In the spring both the birds oc- 

 casionally seem.ed droopy, but a diet of buttermilk benefitted 

 them. Weed seeds that they liked were barnyard grass, crab- 

 grass, foxtail, lambsquartrs, pigeon grass, pigweed, sunflower, and 

 vervain. Neither Vi^ould touch ragv/eed nor giant ragweed, al- 

 though the former at least, is eaten by wild doves. What we fed 

 them generally vv^as wheat and bird seed, as it was easier to buy 

 these at a s^^re than laboriously to collect weed seeds. Of the 

 bird seed they liked the millet and canary seed, but never eat 

 the rape. Another food vv'hich they disdained was earthworms. 



FEEDING TESTS. 

 When conducting a feeding test, I weighed the birds both 

 before the}'' had had anything to eat and after their supper. A 

 series of weights of both birds in November and December is 

 shown in Tables I and II. 



98.4 108.0 9.5 104.8 114.0 



