One of the commonest birds of the country-side is the ring-dove, or woodpigeon. He is the largest of our pigeons, and may further be distinguished by the white half-ring round his neck. His flight scarcely needs to be described, for it differs in no essentials from the pigeons of our dove-cotes. His courtship flight has already been described here. The stock-dove is not quite so conspicuous, but may be readily distinguished from the fact that the neck has no white patch, while the out-spread wings are marked by an imperfect bar of black. It is a bird, by the way, which shows a strange diversity of taste in the selection of the site for its nursery--a rabbit-burrow, a hole in a tree, an old squirrels drey, or the cross-beams in an old church tower! The rock-dove haunts deep caverns worn out of the cliffs, both inland and on the coast. But one can never be certain that one is watching _really_ wild birds. Certain it is that most of the "rock-doves" one sees are domesticated birds run wild. This is the ancestor of our dove-cote birds, from some of which, those with a white rump and two black wing-bars, they cannot be distinguished. It is on account of this ancestry that our domesticated pigeons never alight in trees. They are inherently cliff dwellers. The turtle dove is a summer visitor to the British Islands. The cinnamon brown of its back, bluish ash-grey head, wing-coverts and rump, the patch of black on its neck, and the fan-shaped tail, tipped with white, readily distinguish it from the other three species just described.