There are surprising colours in some young birds: the cirl nestling, as we have seen, is black and crimson--clothed in black down with gaping crimson mouth; loveliest of all is the young snipe in down of brown-gold, frosted with silvery white; but for quaintness and fantastic colouring the turtle-dove nestling has no equal. In all of our native doves, and probably in all doves everywhere, the skin is blue and the down yellow, but the colours differ in intensity. I tried to find a newly-hatched stock-dove to compare it with the turtle nestling but failed, although the species is quite common and, like the other two, breeds till October. Ring-dove nestlings were easy to see, but in these the blue colour, though deep on the beak and head, is quite pale on the body, fading almost to white on some parts; and the down, too, is very pale, fading to whitish tow-colour on the sides and back.
When seeking for a ring-dove in down I had an amusing adventure. At a distance of some miles { 295} from the Itchen, near the Test, one day in September, I was hunting for an insect I wanted in a thick copse by Tidbury Ring, an ancient earthwork on the summit of a chalk hill. Hearing a boy's voice singing near, I peeped out and saw a lad of about fifteen tending some sheep: he was walking about on his knees, trimming the herbage with an old rusty pair of shears which he had found! It startled him a little when I burst out of the cover so near him, but he was ready to enter into conversation, and we had a long hour together, sitting on the sunny down. I mentioned my desire to find a newly-hatched ring-dove, and he at once offered to show me one. There were two nests with young close by, in one the birds were half-fledged, the others only came out of their shells two days before. These we went to look for, the boy leading the way to a point where the trees grew thickest. He climbed a yew, and from the yew passed to a big beech tree, in which the nest was placed, but on getting to it he cried out that the nest was forsaken and the young dead. He threw them down to me, and he was grieved at their death as he had known about the nest from the time it was made, and had seen the young birds alive the day before. No doubt the parents had been shot, and the cold night had quickly killed the little ones.