Scops asio maccalli. Habitat, Highlands of Guatemala, Eastern Mexico, and Valley of the Lower Rio Grande in Texas.
Dichromatic: erythrismal phase tawny or reddish-brown.
Scops asio kennicotti. Habitat, Northwest Coast from Sitka to Oregon and eastward across Washington Territory into Idaho and Montana.
Non-dichromatic: always gray in color.[[15]]
Scops asio bendirei. Habitat, Coast region of California.
Scops asio tricopsis? Habitat, Western Mexico and the extreme southwestern border of the United States.
Scops asio maxwellæ. Habitat, Mountains of Colorado.
A RECONNOISSANCE IN SOUTHWESTERN TEXAS.
BY NATHAN CLIFFORD BROWN.
The village of Boerne in Southwestern Texas, with its environing country, was the field of my ornithological labors between December 21, 1879 and April 4, 1880. Boerne is situated about thirty miles northwest of San Antonio, and less than that distance westerly from New Braunfels, where Messrs. Werner and Ricksecker made their collection, a few years ago.[[16]] It lies in a country of hills and “flats,” scantily watered and largely unproductive, beyond which timber and general vegetation rapidly disappear, as the westward-bound traveller nears the desolation of the Great Plains. Live-oak grows in scattering groves, the postoak in more compact clusters, and cedar occurs in small “brakes” of some density. There are also, along the creek to which the village owes its existence, two or three small oases of deciduous trees admixed with vines, no one of them, perhaps, an acre in extent. The mesquite, which is so common on the prairies to the south and east, is not seen, but is replaced by a small variety of live-oak growing in the form of chaparral. Throughout my stay in it, the country had a very inhospitable and dreary aspect, on account of the almost total lack of grass of any kind; and by its absence the number of the local birds is of course materially diminished.