BOB-WHITES AND QUAILS: SCALED QUAIL 217 
as in the foothills of the Guadalupe Mountains, more favorable seasons and light 
hunting will be required to restore them to normal numbers (Ligon, 1927, p. 134). 
Nest. —On the ground, often under a yucca or low bush, and sometimes in a grain 
field or meadow, generally lined with a few coarse grasses. Eggs: Average, 12 to 14, 
thick Bhelled, without luster, cream white to pale buff, usually rather evenly dotted 
with huffy to reddish brown. 
Food. —The Scaled Quail apparently eats more insect food than any of the other 
quails, or more than 29 per cent as against 70 per cent of vegetable matter. Of this 
vegetable matter over 50 per cent is weed seeds, among which are thistle, pigweed, 
and bindweed, a troublesome weed that often throttles other plants. Dasylirion 
seeds almost entirely filled six stomachs examined. Wild fruit, such as prickly pear 
and the succulent parts of desert plants together with its larger per cent of insect 
food doubtless help it to live with a minimum amount of water. Its insect food 
includes grasshoppers, ants, and beetles—among them leaf chafers and cucumber 
beetles—weevils, such as the clover pest and scale insects (several hundred in one 
stomach) that feed on the roots of plants. 
General Habits. —The natural food of the Scaled or Blue Quail and 
its tameness about houses show how important it will become to the 
agriculturalist in the development of the country if properly protected 
and encouraged to take an active part in keeping down weed and insect 
pests on cultivated land. A family seen by us at the Bolles Ranch near 
Carlsbad loitering around the ranch house and perching on the brush 
woodpile like domestic fowl suggested what protected water and safe, 
congenial roosting places may do to tempt the friendly bird to come in 
from the desert. Where there is little ground cover, as in the Pecos 
Valley between Roswell and Fort Sumner, Mr. Ligon says the Quails 
collect about the ranches and huts where settlers have located, and in a 
corral on the McKenzie Ranch he saw pairs of them picking up grain left 
from feeding the horses. Ten such Quails, from a covey that were reared 
on a ranch east of Roswell and were so tame that they fed with the 
chickens, were killed in a blizzard that swept over the country in 
January, 1918, and apparently many others shared their fate as Mr. 
Ligon found very few in the valley the following summer. 
As the name, Callipepla squamata pallida suggests, this quail whose 
life is spent in the strong sunlight of the arid cactus, mesquite, and 
grease wood valleys and pinyon and juniper foothills, is the palest of its 
family, its bluish gray tones presenting a striking contrast to the dark 
tones of grouse and quail living in humid, forested regions. So well do 
its pale colors and scale-like markings conceal it as it scuds through the 
mazes of the desert brush that the white tip of its crest, which gives it the 
local name of White-top or Cotton-top, is often all that catches one’s 
eye. 
That the downy young are also obliteratively colored is well illus¬ 
trated by an experience of Major Goldman when climbing the Florida 
Mountains. At 5,300 feet, among the oaks and junipers, he reports, 
“I came suddenly on an adult bird and a brood of recently hatched 
