The Prairie Falcon in the Willamette Valley, Oregon
The Prairie Falcon in the Willamette Valley, Oregon
On November 24, 1925, at the Oregon State Game Farm at Corvallis, Oregon, one of the farm employees shot an adult female Falco mexicanus that was in pursuit of a female Ring-neck Pheasant. At this game farm there is kept a breeding stock of several hundred pheasants which, especially during the winter months, attract a number of raptorial birds; but this is the first Prairie Falcon to be seen there, and only the second record of the species in the Humid Coast Belt of western Oregon, of which I have knowledge. The first was a specimen recorded by O. B. Johnson (Amer. Nat., 1880, p. 638).
Mr. Gene Simpson, superintendent of the Oregon Game Farms, who sent me the bird for identification, wrote of it as follows: “We had a few old pinioned pheasants out in an open field, and this bird gave us a lot of trouble. Be this a falcon, he is sure a pheasant killer.“
Stanley G. Jewett
Portland, Oregon, December 7, 1925
