view raw text
MOUNTAIN QUAIL IN THE UPPER WILDS Mountain quail can live at or near sea-level apparently as well as the valley quail. But it loves the wooded glens and singing brooks of the higher ranges, and is at home from where the timber be-gins to cast enough shade, at about three thousand feet, to far away up the slopes where the gray squirrel wldsks his bushy tail no more; where the lavender of the hand-tailed pigeon is seen only as it drifts over the deep blue of the canyon far below, and where the coyote, the fox and the wild cat bring no more anxiety. Though sometimes seen where the arcades of alder that arch over the hissing brook run out. into lowland willows, it is, in the southern part or California.-a bird of the high mountains. On the great San Pedro Martir of Lower California . Mexico it is found where stupendous boulders, idled into cathedral towers, almost hide the giant sugar pines that struggle through the rifts between them.
