Up till the 10th of March the greatest number of doves I had seen on the ground at the same time was twenty-three, although the usual maximum to fly down from the trees in the morning to feed on the ground and from my hands was twenty-two.
That was haw many there were on the morning of the 9th, but two were noticeably off-colour. They were hunched down, not eating with the rest and looked very sleepy. The other twenty were their normal vigorous selves. At night I saw that two were hunched together well under the office part of the building, and in the morning to my dismay one was dead. The other one, a fairly recent chick, died a few hours later despite my attempts to revive it. I assume the first one was its mother. Perhaps she ate something she should not have, such as a poisonous karaka berry, and passed it on to her chick in her 'milk'. I buried them in the forest at the foot of large boulder--Dove Rock as I call it.
That was haw many there were on the morning of the 9th, but two were noticeably off-colour. They were hunched down, not eating with the rest and looked very sleepy. The other twenty were their normal vigorous selves. At night I saw that two were hunched together well under the office part of the building, and in the morning to my dismay one was dead. The other one, a fairly recent chick, died a few hours later despite my attempts to revive it. I assume the first one was its mother. Perhaps she ate something she should not have, such as a poisonous karaka berry, and passed it on to her chick in her 'milk'. I buried them in the forest at the foot of large boulder--Dove Rock as I call it.
So now, somewhere round here, there are twenty-one doves but since that day no more than twenty have arrived on the ground at once.
