Scaled Partridge at Pueblo, Colorado
Scaled Partridge at Pueblo, Colorado
While waiting for a train at Pueblo, Colorado, on July 7, 1904. Mr. Bailey and I explored the outskirts of the town. In a twenty acre park of grass and newly planted trees on the edge of the city we found Arkansas flycatchers, western wood pewees, house finches, a meadowlark, a yellow warbler, and a western chipping sparrow, while a pair of Bullock orioles were feeding grown young. Just outside the park but in a typical desert patch of tree cactus and grease brush where mockingbirds, mourning doves, lark sparrows, and nighthawks were seen, we flushed a scaled partridge (Calipepla squamata). As we followed, it scudded along and then burst into short flights, when crowded circling back on set, curved wings to the place where it had first been flushed, suggesting that it might have a family in the vicinity.
In his Birds of Colorado, Prof. Cooke states that the scaled partridges which were formerly “common along the cedars on the higher arid lands back from the river . . . have been working towards the cultivated lands along the river, ” in the winter of 1899-1900 becoming “in the vicinity of Rocky Ford more common than the bobwhite.” (Birds of Colorado, State Agr, Coll. Bull. 56, 1900, 202.) They have also been recorded from the neighborhood of Denver, so the Pueblo record merely serves to help fill in the line of their extending range.
FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY
Washington, DC
