This set of three eggs I have personally studied; they are of M. g. merriami, and I find them to agree exactly with Captain Bendire's description just quoted.[42]
In the Ralph Collection (U. S. Nat. Mus. No. 27232; orig. No. 10/6) I examined six (6) eggs of M. g. intermedia. They are of a pale ground color, all being uniformly speckled over with minute dots of lightish brown. These eggs are rather large for turkey eggs. They were collected at Brownsville, Texas, May 26, 1894.
Another set of M. g. intermedia collected by F. B. Armstrong (No. 25765, coll. U. S. Nat. Mus.) are practically unspotted, and such spots as are to be found are very faint, both the minute and the somewhat large ones.
In Dr. Ralph's collection (U. S. Nat. Mus. No. 27080) eggs of M. g. intermedia are short, with the large and fine dots of a pale orange yellow. I examined a number of eggs and sets of eggs of M. g. osceola, or Florida turkey. In No. 25787 the eggs are short and broad, the ground color being pale whitish, slightly tinged with brown. Some of the spots on these eggs are unusually large, in a few places, three or four running together, or are more or less confluent; others are isolated and of medium size; many are minute, all being of an earth brown, varying in shades. In the case of No. 25787 of this set, the dark-brown spots are more or less of a size and fewer in number; while one of them (No. 25787) is exactly like the egg of Plate VI, Fig. 22; finally, there is a pale one (No. 25787) with fine spots, few in number in middle third, very numerous at the ends. There are scattered large spots of a dark brown, the surface of each of which latter are raised with a kind of incrustation. Another egg (No. 27869) in the same tray (M. g. osceola) is small, pointed; pale ground color with very fine spots of light brown (coll. W. L. Ralph). Still another in this set (No. 27868) is markedly roundish, with minute brown speckling uniformly distributed. There are nine (9) eggs in this clutch (No. 27868), and apart from the differences in form, they all closely resemble each other; and this is by no means always the case, as the same hen may lay any of the various styles enumerated above, either as belonging to the same clutch, or at different seasons.
As it is not the plan of the author of the present work to touch, in this chapter, upon the general habits of wild turkeys—their courtship, their incubation, the young at various stages, nesting sites, and a great deal more having to do with the natural history of the family and the forms contained in it—it would seem that what has been set forth above in regard to the eggs of the several subspecies in our avifauna pretty thoroughly covers this part of the subject.
Shortly after the last paragraph was completed I received a valuable photograph of the nest and eggs of M. g. merriami, and this I desire to publish here with a few notes, although in so doing it constitutes a departure from what I have just stated above in regard to the nests of turkeys.
This photograph was kindly furnished me by my friend Mr. F. Stephens of the Society of Natural History of San Diego, California, with permission to use it in the present connection. It has not to my knowledge been published before, though the existence of the negative from which it was printed has been made known to ornithologists by Major Bendire, who says, in his account of the "Mexican Turkey" in his Life Histories of North American Birds (loc. cit. p. 118): "That well-known ornithologist and collector, Mr. F. Stephens, took a probably incomplete set of nine fresh eggs of this species, on June 15th, 1884. He writes me: 'I was encamped about five miles south of Craterville, on the east side of the Santa Rita Mountains in Arizona; the nest was shown to my assistant by a charcoal burner. On his approach to it the bird ran off or flew before he got within good range. He did not disturb it but came to camp, and in the afternoon we both went, and I took my little camera along and photographed it. The bird did not show up again. The locality was on the east slope of the Santa Rita Mountains, in the oak timber, just where the first scattering pines commenced, at an altitude of perhaps 5000 feet.'
"A good photograph, kindly sent me by Mr. Stephens, shows the nest and eggs plainly. It was placed close to the trunk of an oak tree on a hillside, near which a good-size yucca grew, covering, apparently, a part of the nest; the hollow in which the eggs were placed was about 12 inches across and 3 inches deep. Judging from the photograph the nest was fairly well lined."
In order to complete my share of the work, I will now add here a few paragraphs and illustrations upon the skeletal differences to be found upon comparison of that part of the anatomy of wild and domesticated turkeys. This is a subject I wrote upon many years ago; what I then said I have just read over, and I find I can do no better than quote the part contained in the "Analytical Summary" of the work. It is more or less technical and therefore must be brief, though it is none the less necessary to complete the subject of the present treatise.[43]