AMERICAN QUAIL 
269 
secondaries white, primaries fuscous, upper tail-coverts white, base of tail 
white, end fuscous, lower breast and belly white. Im. — Similar, but head 
and neck blackish and upperparts more or less margined with buffy. L., 
19-00; W., 10-50; Tar., 2*40; B., 3*40. 
Range . — Coasts of N. and S. A. from Tex., La., and Va. (formerly N. J.) 
s. on both coasts of Mex. to the West Indies, s. Brazil, and cen. Chile; 
casual n. to N. B. Breeds probably throughout its range. 
Long Island, A. V. 
Nest, a depression in the sand. Eggs, 3, buffy white or creamy buff, 
rather evenly spotted and blotched with chocolate, 2*20 x 1*55. Date, 
Mouth St. John’s River, Fla., Apl. 10; Coast S. C., Apl. 20; Cobb’s Is., Va., 
May 10. 
This not uncommon species from Virginia southward, is confined 
{ exclusively to the coast, and breeds usually in isolated pairs. Wayne 
states that in the winter it is found on the South Carolina coast in 
flocks of from twenty to seventy-five individuals. It agrees in habits 
with other members of this small family. 
1905. Job, H. K., Wild Wings, 239 (nesting). 
The European Oyster-catcher {285. Hcematopus ostralegus ) is of 
accidental occurrence in Greenland. 
The Mexican Jacana {288. Jacana spinosa ) occurs in the lower Rio 
Grande valley of Tex., in Cuba and southward, and has been once 
recorded from Fla. (Lake Okeechobee, Oct. 1889; Mearns, Auk, 1902, 79). 
X. ORDER GALLING. GALLINACEOUS BIRDS^ 
30. Family Odontophoriml American Quail. (Fig. 44.) 
The members of this family, some sixty in number, are the American 
representatives of the Old World Perdicidce, or true Quails and Par- 
tridges, to which structurally they are closely related though differing 
in external appearance. Doubtless the two ‘families,’ as for conven- 
ience we term them, had a common origin, just as Old and New World 
Pigeons, or Parrots, or Spoonbills, for example, have had, and we may 
believe that in the later Tertiary Period, when a much warmer climate 
prevailed in Arctic regions, their range was doubtless continuous. 
The present center of abundance of the American species is in the 
tropics, to which the seventeen species of Wood Quail of the genus 
Odontophorus are confined, only seven of the sixty members of the 
family crossing our southern border. This includes our Bob-white 
and the Masked Bob-white of northern Sonora, and formerly, at least, 
southern Arizona, the Scaled, Mearns’ and Gambel’s Quails of 
our Mexican border States, and the California Valley and Mountain 
Quails. 
In eastern North America we have only one species, our familiar 
Bob-white, not, as we are apt to imagine it, a distinctively North 
American bird, but the most northern representative of a type whose 
stronghold is in Mexico where ten forms of the genus Colinus are known. 
