New Mexico · UplandGambel's quail

Gambel's quail is New Mexico's desert-lowland quail. NMDGF's own habitat description (desert mountain foothills, brushy drainages, adjoining cultivated lands) is corroborated by independent hunting-press sourcing naming the southern borderlands, with the Organ Mountains/Mesilla Valley area (Dona Ana County) called out as a prime spot. NMDGF's own species distribution map shows the full range is broader than that southern concentration alone: a contiguous mass covering the southwestern quarter of the state that narrows into a corridor up the Rio Grande valley and western mountains as far north as the Taos/Rio Arriba border, plus two smaller populations disconnected from that main range — one in northern San Juan County, one straddling Lincoln and northern Otero counties. This gives NM's four quail species genuinely distinct sub-state habitat zones: Gambel's in the low desert south/west/Rio Grande corridor (plus two outlying pockets), scaled across the eastern plains, Montezuma in south-central/southwestern oak-pine mountains, and bobwhite in the southeastern shinnery-oak country.