104 
THE CONDOR 
Vol. XV 
The food of these hawks was largely mice and other small rodents, but not 
entirely so. I sometimes found Meadowlark feathers around the nest, and once 
the wing, foot and breast-bone of a young Sharp-tailed Grouse. I often found 
well-picked bones of various small animals in the nest, and believe that the young 
usually picked the meat from the bones rather than swallow the animals whole, 
as the young Short-eared Owls did. They also apparently did not swallow fur, 
feathers and bones so frequently as the owls did. I found a few ejected pellets 
around the nest when the young were pretty well grown, but they were much 
smaller than those about the owls' nest, and there were very few of them. 
THE WILD TURKEYS OF COLORADO 
By WELLS W. COOKE 
WITH MAP 
T he turkey was first formally included in the list of Colorado birds by Ridg- 
way in 1873 {Bull. Esse.v lust.^ p. 179) under the name of Mcleagris gallo- 
pavo which at that time meant a turkey similar to the Kansas bird. To this 
was added by Morrison {Orn. OoL, 1888, p. 70) Mcleagris gallopavo mexicana, 
from La Plata County, to represent the form of turkey found in southwestern 
Colorado. These two forms remained unquestioned in the Colorado list until 1900 
when, the Rocky Mountain turkey was separated by Nelson as merriami {Auk, 
1900, p. 120). An examination showed that every specimen of a turkey in all 
the Colorado collections belonged to the new form, even one taken near Canyon 
City, where the eastern bird had been supposed to occur. 
In referring to this matter in Tht Condor for July, 1912, I said: “The only 
claim the form (i. e., the eastern turkey) has, rests on the assumption that the 
birds of southeastern Colorado (where the species was very common a hundred 
years ago) must have been the same as the birds a little to the eastward in Kan- 
sas and Oklahoma. As the species is now supposed to be extinct in that part of 
Colorado, it is probable that the matter never can be settled.” 
During the last few days I have had occasion to go over the whole matter 
again and have become convinced that the assumption of a continuous range of 
turkeys from Kansas and Oklahoma to Colorado is erroneous. Lieut. Pike in 
1806 found turkeys enormously abundant along the Arkansas from the foothills 
to the site of the present town of Pueblo. In 1820 Maj. Long finds them com- 
mon at the junction of the Las Animas and Arkansas rivers. There his party 
divided, and Say’s division which folloAved down the Arkansas does not report 
seeing turkeys until they had passed far into Kansas to about where Wichita is 
now. Maj. Long’s party went south into New Mexico and crossed the north- 
eastern part of that State to the valley of the Canadian River ; he does not recoi'd 
turkeys until after he reached the Canadian River in Texas some twenty miles 
west of the presHit town of Tascosa, that is, he saw no turkeys during the wdiolc 
time he was in New Mexico. As his party was living on stale horse meat, and 
had hunters out all the time, it is safe to assume that they would have found tur- 
keys had there been any present. 
In 1846 Lieut. Abert spent a summer in this same region. He speaks of the 
