WESTERN EVENING GROSBEAK 251 



western Texas (Guadalupe Mountains, Kerr County); east to South 

 Dakota (Deadwood) and Oklahoma (Caddo County). 



Casual record. — Casual in Virginia (Alexandria). 



Egg daUs. — California: 22 records, June 8 to July 30; 12 records, 

 July 1 to July 12. 



Colorado: 2 records, July 4 and July 10. 



New Mexico: 2 records, June 22 and June 26. 



Utah: 4 records. May 27 to June 15. 



HESPERIPHONA VESPERTINA MONTANA Ridgway 



Mexican Evening Grosbeak 

 Contributed by Doris Huestis Speirs 



Habits 



This colorful bird may be found from the Santa Catalina, Chirica- 

 hua, and Huachuca Mountains of Pima and Cochise counties, south- 

 eastern Arizona, southward in the mountains as far as the highlands 

 of southern Mexico. 



In describing some of the ''birding" highlights of the Huachucas, 

 Roger Tory Peterson (1948) \\Tites: 



What mountains these are! Where else can one follow a coppery-tailed 

 trogon as it intones its deep cowm cowm cowin cowm among the oaks and syca- 

 mores of a hot canyon, and an hour or two later see evening grosbeaks in the firs 

 at a higher altitude? * * * 



The grosbeak * * * is the same plump yellow bird with the big pale bill 

 that one sees in the fir forests of Canada or on New England feeding trays in 

 winter, a different race, perhaps — they call it the Mexican evening grosbeak — 

 but to all appearances the same bird. There must be a point in the canyon, I 

 suppose, where the oaks give way to the pines and where it is possible for a gros- 

 beak to look upon a trogon. 



Joe T. Marshall, Jr., writes me of the grosbeaks in Mexico : "It is 

 always a pleasure to find them, particularly in the nearby mountains 

 of Sonora and extreme northwestern Chihuahua." There he was 

 surprised to find none of the Mexican species, the Abeille (or hooded) 

 grosbeak, H. abeillei, but only the evening grosbeak, "which becomes 

 quite abundant in the higher parts of the Sierra Madre, and the 

 Sierra Huachinera of Sonora." R. H. Palmer (1923) who saw the 

 bird in a deep barranca in the state of Hidalgo, in commenting on the 

 brightness of the plumage, says "the yellow was much brighter than 

 I have seen in the birds of the North." The original description of 

 this subspecies (Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway, 1874a) reads in part: 

 "Yellow frontal crescent narrow, less than half as wide as tlie black 

 behind it; inner webs of the tertials without any black; secondaries 

 and inner webs of tail-feathers without white tips. * * * In size it 

 is also a little smaller." 



