104 THE CONDOR Vol. XV The food of these hawks was largel? 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 IlE turkey was first formally included in the list of Colorado birds by Ridg- way in I873 (Bull. Esse:: Inst., p. i79 ) under the name of Meleagris gallo- pavo which at that time meant a turkey similar to the Kansas bird.. To this was added by Morrison (Orn. & Ool., I888, p. 7 o) Meleagris gallopavo rnexicana, from La Plata County, to represent the form of turkey found in southwestern Colorado. These two forms remained unquestioned in the Colorado list until i9oo when the Rocky Mountain turkey was separated by Nelson as merriami (.duk, I9OO, p. I2O). 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 ?astern bird had been supposed to occur. In referring to this matter in THE CoNnor{ for July, I912 , 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 xvhole matter again and have become convinced that the assumption of a continuous range oi turkeys from Kansas and Oklahoma to Colorado is erroneous. Lieut. Pike in I8o6 found turkeys enormously abundant along the Arkansas from the foothills .t the site of the present town of Pueblo. In I82O 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 followed 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 record turkeys until after he reached the Canadian River in Texas some twenty miles west of the present town of Tascosa, that is, he saw no tin'keys during the whole 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 t846 Lieut. Abert spent a summer in this same region. He speaks of the
