Pink-necked Green-Pigeon / Punai Gading

The Malay name, Punai Gading, can be translated as ivory green-pigeon.  This is a medium-sized bird, about 30 cm long and weighing about 150 grams. 

Males are the same size as females, but more colourful.  

However, both birds can be difficult to see in the tree canopy where they pass most of their time.  I often see spotted and zebra doves on the ground, but these green-pigeons only come down from the tree tops when they are thirsty or they need more grit for their gizzard.  As birds do not have teeth, mechanical digestion requires birds to swallow grit.  These small stones pass through the digestive tract and eventually would need to be replenished.  Note that, eventually could be a year or more (US Dept of Agriculture BF Kaupp 1924).  Trees provide fruit for birds in the hope that their seeds will be dispersed.  Green-pigeons with grit in their gizzards could be considered to cheat the system.   Their gizzard is able to grind the seed into small pieces that can be chemically digested.  However, it has been discovered that some green-pigeons lack grit and do function to disperse the fruit seeds. 

In former times, this green-pigeon lived in coastal mangroves and forest edges. Now it is common in parks, farms, and plantations.  These green-pigeons are considered non-migratory.  However, likely they do travel long distances in search of fruiting trees.

Their diet is close to 100 percent fruit, especially wild figs.  Trees in fruit are scarce but once found provide more food than any single bird or pair can eat.  Hence, these birds are social.  At dusk up to 100 birds (sometimes including other species of green pigeon)  can be found in a communal roost.  Unusually for a social bird, they are not very vocal.  It occasionally produces whistling and quacking noises which eBird describes as “strange, alien-sounding coos.” Pink-necked Green-Pigeon - eBird

The nest is a seemingly haphazard arrangement of sticks which provides good ventilation.  Or perhaps the nest is built  roughly to allow some expansion as the chicks grow.  Just two eggs are laid; incubation takes 17 days and the chicks grow quickly after hatching, fledging after just 10 days.  

The nest seems too small! 

Most birds feed their nestlings on insects and breeding takes place when a large supply of insects are expected.  All pigeons and doves have a different arrangement.  Nestlings are fed a high protein, high fat mixture called crop milk, produced as the name implies from cells lining the crop.  Wikipedia defines the crop as “an expanded, muscular pouch near the gullet … essentially an enlarged part of the oesophagus.”  Crop (anatomy) - Wikipedia  Since the secretion is semi-solid ‘crop cheese’ might have been a better name.  Both the male and the female provide crop milk. for the first seven days nestlings are fed entirely crop milk.  In the second week, they are given a mixture of fruit and crop milk.  Fledglings still require food from parents but now this is mostly regurgitated partly digested fruit.  Crop milk frees pigeons from having their breeding season defined by insect abundance.  Records indicate that pink-necked green pigeons do breed in every month of the year.  This would seem to give pigeons an advantage in the ecosystem.  On the other hand, squab dependence on crop milk also confers disadvantages.  As each parent is limited in the amount of crop milk it can produce, a nesting pair can feed only one or two squabs in each nesting cycle, whereas many other species can raise four or more nestlings at one go.

Two days prior to fledging.