WESTERN MARTIN 509 



Ontario: 3 records, May 30 to June 18. 

 Texas : 6 records, April 30 to June 2. 

 Wisconsin : 9 records, May 18 to July 19. 



PROGNE SUBIS HESPERIA Brewster 



WESTERN MARTIN 

 HABITS 



William Brewster (1889) described and named this race of the 

 purple martin from a large series collected in southern Lower Cali- 

 fornia, "where the race shows its most pronounced characters. The 

 males of this race are indistinguishable, he said, from the males of 

 the eastern race, only the females showing the characters on which 

 the subspecies is based. He described the female as "differing from 

 female subis in having the abdomen, anal region, crissum, and under 

 tail-coverts pure white, nearly or quite immaculate, the throat, breast, 

 flanks, forehead, fore part of crown and nuchal collar grayish white, 

 the feathers of the back and rump conspicuously edged with grayish 

 or pale brown, the bend of the wing and the under wing-coverts 

 mottled profusely with whitish." He gave as its habitat : "California 

 (Ojai Valley) and Lower California (Sierra de la Laguna)." He 

 included the California locality in the range because, he said, "Mr. 

 Batchelder has two females from the Ojai Valley, California, which 

 are practically identical with my Lower California specimens." 



Later Mr. Ridgway (1904), in describing this race, called attention 

 to its slightly smaller size but did not emphasize the pure white of 

 the posterior under parts. He extended its range still farther north- 

 ward to British Columbia, apparently including the whole inter- 

 vening Pacific slope. Based on the findings of these two eminent 

 ornithologists, the name hesperia has been applied for many years 

 to the purple martins breeding we^t of the Rocky Mountains. This 

 is not surprising when we consider the somewhat difficult problem 

 in systematics involved, which Dr. Joseph Grinnell (1928a) attempted 

 to solve and whose solution has been accepted in the 1931 Check-list. 

 Grinnell made a careful study of a series of 99 specimens of purple 

 martins from California, Lower California, and eastern localities 

 and discovered that there was a gradual diminution in size between 

 the most northern-breeding birds and those from southern Lower 

 California; and he noted that there was also a progressive increase 

 in the amount of white on the under parts between the northern and 

 the southern birds. The problem was whether to include the Pacific 

 coast birds under the eastern race, subis, to leave them as they were, 

 under hesperia, or to describe a new subspecies to include the birds 



