298 
BIRDS OF NEW MEXICO 
Food.—M ainly nuts, especially acorns, and berries, including wild currant, 
chokecherry, wild cherry, juniper, madrone, manzanita, raspberry, blackberry, 
elderberry, huckleberry, salmonberry, coffceberry (Rhamnus califomica), Christmas 
berry, and black gooseberry; wild grapes, flowers and leaf buds, sycamore balls, pine 
buds, seeds, and needles, and grain (mostly waste); together with grasshoppers and 
other insects. 
General Habits. —The Band-tailed Pigeon, with the remarkable 
yellow and pink eye, the largest of the New Mexico pigeons, delight¬ 
fully associated with wooded canyons and oak brush slopes, is well 
named, for when in changing his course in flight or alighting on a tree, 
he spreads his square tail, the light band makes a conspicuous recog¬ 
nition mark. He is a bird of strong individuality and when off guard 
flies about among the nut pines and junipers around water holes flapping 
his wings loudly; and when calling from his nesting ground, he hoots 
like an owl. 
Before hooting, Mr. Wales tells us, with neck stretched out and 
head bent down to a right angle, he opens his bill a crack and “gives 
one gasp which fills out the skin of his neck till about three times 
natural size, and at the same time utters a very faint oo which is not 
usually audible over twenty feet.” Then follows the whoo-oo or hoot, 
which “is made by a quick expelling of the air from the bird’s lungs. 
. . . The swelled neck skin is not reduced, as the bill is opened and 
the lungs are refilled for the following coo. There are usually about 
seven or eight of these hoots in a series, but sometimes as many as 
eleven. When finished, the pigeon brings his neck back into its natural 
position and allows the air to escape from under the neck skin (1926, 
p. 42.) 
The roost of a small colony was found by Mr. Gaut in a grove of 
wild cherries in the foothills of the Capitan Mountains. The Band- 
tails would come in about dusk and fly away about sunrise. As they 
always came and went in the same directions they doubtless spent 
the day on some especially good feeding ground, and the examination 
of those shot showed that they had been eating green acorns, juniper 
berries, and wild grapes (MS). Two specimens examined in the 
Guadalupe Mountains had swallowed their acorns whole—in the 
cups—which demonstrates the astonishing grinding power of their 
gizzards. In Mineral Canyon, where the ground was covered with 
acorns, in October, 1915, Mr. Ligon saw from six to fifteen Band-tails 
every time he passed up the canyon. When pinyon nuts can be 
obtained, he says, the Pigeons feed almost entirely on them. In the 
fall, in the Sacramento Mountains south of Mescalero he found them 
feeding on elderberries—“twenty-four birds in a single bunch”—and 
he was told of much larger flocks about Cloudcroft at the same time. 
In the spring, however, one of the Taos Indians told us, the birds eat 
