288 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING 
from southern Colorado south through Arizona and 
New Mexico, and grades into the Mexican turkey on 
the south and into the eastern wild turkey on the east. 
On all streams flowing east from the Rocky Mountains 
over the great plains, from the Niobrara, which is near 
the northern boundary of Nebraska, south nearly to 
the Rio Grande, turkeys were formerly common, and 
these were the ordinary bird of the Mississippi Valley. 
They lived along these various rivers, many of which 
have their heads in the mountains, and following up 
these streams to the mountains, there intergrade with 
the mountain bird. E. W. Nelson has shown where this 
takes place. 
In these days, when the common wild turkey is ex- 
tinct over much of its former range, it is very difficult 
to define with exactness the former boundaries of that 
range. We know that it was abundant in southern 
New England and to the south. Audubon speaks of it 
rather vaguely as found in southern Vermont, New 
Hampshire and Maine, and it is certain that it was 
once very abundant in Massachusetts, where many 
years ago I saw a skin taken at Mt. Tom about 1848 
or 1840. 
Wm. Brewster, in his admirable volume on the 
“Birds of the Cambridge Region of Massachusetts,” 
published in 1906, as No. IV of the Memoirs of the 
Nuttall Ornithological Club, has gathered much inter- 
esting information concerning the turkey in eastern 
Massachusetts and in Maine. He says: 
“Morton, referring, no doubt, to his experience at 
