DISTRIBUTION OF BIRDS 
5 
most part, have appeared previously in publications of the Bureau of 
Biological Survey, United States Department of Agriculture; the Na¬ 
tional Park Service, United States Department of the Interior; the 
National Association of Audubon Societies; Bird-Lore, and the Hand¬ 
book of Birds of the Western United States, published by the Houghton 
Mifflin Company. 
Twenty-three of the colored plates are by Maj. Allan Brooks and 
one by the late Louis Agassiz Fuertes. 
DISTRIBUTION OF BIRDS IN NEW MEXICO 
The birds of New Mexico affect the agricultural situation according 
to their status, whether they are merely birds of passage stopping on 
their way between northern breeding grounds and southern wintering 
grounds, as some of the sandpipers and plovers; whether they are 
summer residents, coming in to check the ravages of insects and rodents 
and the spread of noxious weeds during the period of greatest insect, 
mammal, and plant activity, as the cuckoos, goatsuckers, swifts, fly¬ 
catchers, blackbirds, orioles, swallows, vireos, warblers, and others, 
and some of the hawks, finches, and sparrows; or whether they are 
permanent residents, carrying on the work of destroying insects, rodents, 
and weeds throughout the year, as quails and grouse, many of the hawks 
and owls, the road-runners, woodpeckers, ravens, jays, blackbirds, 
meadowlarks, wrens, thrashers, chickadees, and nuthatches. 
The importance of birds to special interests depends not only on the 
time they spend in the State, but upon their distribution, whether they 
confine their good work to the timbered regions or work also in the 
orchard tracts; whether they make their homes on the mountain peaks 
or in the agricultural valleys. Their economic value, the special pro¬ 
tection to be accorded them, and the efforts made to attract them are 
therefore matters determinable only by a knowledge of the habits and 
distribution of each species. But, as Professor Cooke pointed out, 
the problem of the distribution of the birds of New Mexico is a difficult 
and complex one. As he said, “the Mountain Bluebird nests from 5,800 
to 10,300 feet, ranges in fall to the top of Wheeler Peak, 13,600 feet 
(aneroid), the highest point in the State, and descends in winter to 
the lowest valleys of southern New Mexico [about 2,800 feet]; the White¬ 
tailed Ptarmigan occupies both summer and winter only a few square 
miles of the tops of the highest peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Range; 
the Arizona Hooded Oriole, the Arizona Pyrrhuloxia, and the Crissal 
Thrasher are found throughout the year in the extreme southwestern 
part of New Mexico, being restricted to an area containing less than 
one-twentieth of the State; the Chestnut-collared Longspur breeds far 
north of New Mexico, but enters the State in the fall, is widely dis¬ 
persed there through the winter and leaves in April for its summer 
