When I began my research on quail of North America, I really did not know there were so many species and subspecies in Central America, Mexico, and North America. The quail of the American continent are referred to as New World quail and those of the European and Asia continents are referred to as Old World quail. Of course, hunters and taxidermists consider them gamebirds and depending on what part of the country you live in, quail are quail, with a regional name for each of the species.
In my search for reference it was easy to see that the most common species in the United States were the California quail, bobwhite quail, Gambel’s quail, and scaled quail (commonly called blue quail). I was able to find some good reference for these. The mountain quail, which is found in the mountains of the western USA, was a tough one to find reference where I could acquire copyrights.
There are many subspecies of all of these, so for the purpose of this photo reference, I will group the photos according to the species name that is common with the subspecies. I will give brief descriptions of the four species that are most common in the USA with range maps of their distribution.