I guess I should have considered this earlier. There used to be a quail farm a couple of miles from here. It's been gone for a decade or more, but I have seen quail scurrying across the road down that way from time to time.
I couldn't match the horizontal marking under the eye or the yellow coloring on the head to any Merlin or other hawk photos on the web, so I went to the experts at Cornell. Here is the reply I received today:
That's not a hawk. Notice the lack of talons on the feet. The bird is also too chunky and short winged to manage the quick maneuvers that hawks require. That's a female Northern Bobwhite. You can learn more about the species on the Cornell Lab's All About Birds online guide: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Bobwhite/id
Happy FeederWatching, Anne Marie Johnson Project Assistant
Project FeederWatch Cornell Lab of Ornithology 159 Sapsucker Woods Road Ithaca, NY 14850 http://feederwatch.org (607) 254-2416