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Bob White — Part 4
Images coming soon.
Once the firing ceases, sweet minor scatter calls--quoi-hee, quoi-hee--reunite the diminished members of a flock. A solitary survivor has been known to wander about the country through an entire winter, calling mournfully and almost incessantly for the missing brothers and sisters, until a farmer, whose family had feasted on their delicate white flesh, unable to listen to the cry that sounded to him like the voice of an accusing conscience, again picked up his gun and put the mourner out of misery.
Among the thousands upon thousands of "quail" shot annually, some sportsman finds either an albino or some other freak wearing plumage that he is certain belongs to a distinct species; but the Texan and the Florida birds alone are true, but merely climatic, variations of our own Bob White. The former is distinguished by its paler, more grayish tone of the upper parts, that are marked with tawny, while the Florida bird has darker, richer coloring, with heavier black markings, and a longer, jet black bill.
Several allied "quail" (partridges) are of too local a distribution on the Pacific slope and in the southwest to be included in a book that avowedly excludes "local and rare birds." Wherever the prolific Bob Whites have been introduced and protected in the west, they have so quickly spread as to encourage the hope that since true sportsmen everywhere are taking active measures to stay the hand of bird butchers, our national game bird may some day regain the vast numbers brutally destroyed.