Cottontops

Scaled Quail in Willcox, Arizona. Note that the habitat in this photo is lacking what one thinks of as certain critical features: no cars up on blocks, no abandoned washing machines, no steaming meth labs.

Callipepla squamata, to use the mellifluous scientific name, is the type species of its genus; “calli” means beautiful, as in “beautiful writing” or “calligraphy,” and “pepla” is from a Greek word for cloak, as in “beautifully cloaked bird” or “Phainopepla.” “Squamata” is the same as the English adjective “squamate,” of course, “scaled.”

In 1832, Wagler, unaware that the species had already been named by Vigors two years earlier, (re)described it under the epithet strenua, meaning active or bold, as in Horace’s famous oxymoron “strenua inertia.” Coincidentally enough, Wagler’s German name for the genus, “Schuppenhuhn,” takes up Vigors’s original epithet, which together give us the English name of the bird.

More than you wanted to know? Then get up from the computer and go birding!