Sp. Char. Head with an elongated, pointed crest, springing from the crown. Upper parts generally pale ashy-brown; hood, sides of neck, and under parts of body, rather paler. Long crest-feathers, bill all round including lores and encircling the eye, wing and tail, dark crimson. Chin and upper part of throat, breast, and median line of the belly, under tail-coverts, tibia, edge and inner coverts of the wings, bright carmine-red. Bill yellowish. Length, about 8.50; wing, 3.75; tail, 4.50.
Female similar, with the under part brownish-yellow; middle of belly and throat only tinged with red.
Hab. Valley of the Rio Grande of Texas and westward; Cape St. Lucas; Mazatlan, Mexico.
Pyrrhuloxia sinuata.
The wing is considerably rounded, the fourth and fifth quills longest; the first as long as the secondaries, the second longer than the seventh. The tail is long, graduated on the sides, the outer about half an inch shorter than the middle. The feathers are very broad to the end and obliquely truncate. They are rather broader than in Cardinalis virginianus. The crest is narrower and longer, and confined to the middle of the crown; it extends back about 1.80 inches from the base of the bill.
The carmine of the breast is somewhat hidden by grayish tips to the feathers; that of the throat is streaked a little with darker. The exposed surfaces of the wing-coverts and of secondaries and tertials are like the back. The tail-feathers are tipped with brownish.
Specimens from Cape St. Lucas are very much smaller than any others, measuring only, wing, 3.30; tail, 3.80. The crest is dull carmine, instead of dark wine-purple; the red tinge on wing and tail much fainter, and the sides, as well as the gray tints everywhere, more brownish; there is none of that dark burnt-carmine tint to the red of lores and cheeks observable in all the Texas specimens. No. 49,758, Camp Grant, Arizona, is like the Cape St. Lucas birds in colors, except that the crest is dusky, but the proportions are those of the Rio Grande series.
Habits. The Texan Cardinal was originally described as a bird of Mexico by Prince Charles Lucien Bonaparte in the Proceedings of the Zoölogical Society of London. It has since been ascertained to inhabit the southern central portions of our country, its range of extension northerly bringing it within the limits of the United States. In Texas, on the Rio Grande, it is resident throughout the year, or of but limited migration in the coldest weather. It was not observed by Dr. Coues in Arizona, but is said to occur in the southern portion of that Territory. It was found breeding at Cape St. Lucas by Mr. Xantus. It is not named by Sumichrast among the birds of Vera Cruz.
Its habits are said to be of the same general character with those of our common Cardinal.