GAMBEL’S PARTRIDGE. 
HILE disputing the palm for beauty of dress and 
gallant appearance with its relative the California 
Partridge, the present species possesses all of the same 
disagreeable traits when he is regarded in the light of 
a game bird. In his legs does he trust, and the rocky 
cafions and hillsides are his delight, and when met with 
at the base of these often lofty and steeply ascending 
cliffs, instead of flying as any well-mannered Quail would 
do, he runs with all his might, leaping from stone to 
stone, dodging behind one bowlder after another until 
he becomes a mere speck above one, or disappears 
altogether. The range of this handsome bird extends 
from western Texas, through New Mexico and Arizona 
to California, where it meets the Valley Partridge in San 
Bernardino County, the Colorado desert proving an 
effective barrier to its extension farther westward. It is 
also found in southeastern Utah, and was introduced at 
Fort Union in northern New Mexico. It also crosses 
our southern border and is a resident of northwestern 
Mexico. Any kind of a locality within its dispersion 
seems to be perfectly satisfactory to this bird; whether it 
be a dry and sandy stretch blistering in torrid heat, or a 
place rocky and bare of leafy covering, or tracts hidden 
by the densest and most impregnable thickets—they are 
all the same to Gambel’s Quail. From my experience, 
however, in hunting them, I should say, if they had any 
choice of locality it lay between dense clumps, matted 
with vines and bristling with thorns, into and through 
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