188 Captain H. S. Stokes—Breeding of the Carolina Mourning Dove


crammed into small and overcrowded boxes with no proper cleaning

of floors or perches. Perhaps the same boxes may be used for trip

after trip to avoid the bother of making new ones. In a hot climate

a few hours in an insanitary and infected box is enough to seal the fate

of any susceptible Parrakeet, and as the period of incubation of the

disease varies, it is perfectly easy to buy birds that look perfectly

healthy and yet find them drop off one by one a few days later. An

inexperienced person, or one who cannot ascertain the exact cause of

death, will attribute his losses to change of diet or to the bird’s natural

delicacy or cussedness, but if you have had experience—as I did in

pre-war days—of a real good septic fever outbreak due to the primitive

sanitation of dealers’ shops and travelling cages, you will know in what

direction to look for the true cause of your troubles !



THE BREEDING OF THE CAROLINA

MOURNING DOVE


(Zenaidura macroura carolinensis)


By Captain H. S. Stokes


Mr. Rogers sent me this pair of Doves early in March from an

importation just received. According to Mr. Newman in Aviculture ,

there appear to be more than one race of this Dove, and I have no

means of knowing exactly where mine came from, but the description

he gives seems to fit my birds. They are greyish-brown with purple

reflections on the neck and a dash of mauve on the breast. And they

have a black spot behind the eye and on the wing coverts, and a

graduated tail, the centre feathers rather pointed at the end. My

pair were rather rough in plumage on arrival but very quickly improved

in a warm flight. There were no nest boxes indoors, but the very

first day they were let outdoors they started to explore an open¬

sided box filled with bracken, and quickly built a small nest of twigs

in it.


So far as we know only one egg was laid, certainly only one was

incubated, but I am sure the normal clutch must be two. I cannot

state the period of incubation, but a well-grown and feathered young



