Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Birds

Scaled Quail, also known as Blue Quail, are familiar to rural Llaneros
September 29, 2002

The blue quail is a most-beloved bird on local ranches. Most ranchers have a “pet” covey known as a “little bunch,” even if its numbers exceed a hundred. If there is a little pecan grove on the place, the “little bunch” grows to two hundred or more, drawn by the mowed green grass providing seeds and grasshoppers for food, constant little puddles of water to drink and delightful shade for the afternoon siesta. The quail, known in bird books as scaled quail, opportunistically hang around the barns, the sick-cow tending pen, the house stock tank, and the chickens (if chickens are kept.) Nothing gets a ranch family madder than for someone to shoot into “the little bunch.” If the family wants to have a quail fry they “go over into the pasture” to hunt, and never ever kill the ones at the house.

With our nine year drought the blue quail numbers are higher than bobwhites. Back in the rainy ‘80’s the “bobs” became more plentiful. They need green weed leaves to munch on in the spring, but "blues" do not. Normally the Sibley Nature Center has one or two coveys of blues and one or two of bobs. This year we have only been able to find one covey of blues. The parents must have nested early, back in late March, for by the first of May a dozen birds were in the group.

One year we had a mixed covey. Three young bobwhites joined a covey of blues and tagged along with them for the rest of the year and all through the winter. In the February, 1965 Phalarope (the newsletter of the Midland Naturalists’ (also known as the Midnats)) Ola Dublin Haynes wrote about finding a covey where the adults were blues, and babies following along behind were bobwhites. Jim Henderson, the best of the old school hunter-conservationists I have ever known, told me that he killed a hybrid of the two species a few years back.

Sibley had a forlorn “cottontop” hanging around the building in June. We decided it was a female, for it never called. Lonely males will call all day long, their “per-ching” call echoing hollowly in the heat. This little female came to visit at least once a morning and once in the afternoon. It would walk along the edge of the sidewalk, picking up seeds blown across the parking lot. After getting its fill, she would stand in front of the foyer at the entrance and stand in the shade, motionless, as if lost in thought. After pausing there for up to ten minutes, it would walk out to the Torrey Yucca in the Aubrey and Jean Reid Native Plant Garden, sit down, wiggle a bit and then go to sleep. Even when groups of visitors arrived, it would not move unless somebody walked along the trail to the bench.

Blue quail are traditionalists. To see them act out of character is a shock. They are rarely off the ground, except for the guard bird keeping watch for a female on the nest or while the covey feeds. The guards will get up on the tallest mesquite or a fence post. We had one perch on top of a telephone pole here at Sibley, after the utility company had removed wires from it in preparation to taking down the pole. Even more bizarre was the discovery by a Midnat of a winter covey sleeping thirty in a row, wing to wing, on a branch of a pine tree at Resthaven Cemetary.

A ranchwoman down near Ozona once told us of a very confused blue quail. This quail laid her eggs in an abandoned mockingbird nest that was eight feet off the ground. It could have been that the quail had begun nesting during a rainy spell that May, and found the ground and the grass too wet. In all the scientific literature no mention has ever been made of quail using the nest of any other species of bird, or ever even nesting off of the ground.

Mrs. Joe Clayton kept a close eye on that nest. One day the mockingbirds and cardinals were raising a fuss and when she looked out, a coachwhip snake was climbing the shrub where the quail eggs were. She grabbed a hoe and yanked him out, then chased him out of the yard, smacking him with the handle. All the while the hen quail sat on the nest crying with a most pitiful lament.

During the nesting period the male quail sat in a live oak tree about fifty feet away, and the two birds talked back and forth at intervals all through the day. Mrs. Clayton worried about the babies, because precocial birds leave the nest the day they are born. One day Mrs. Clayton detected a sudden change in the conversational tone between the two parents, so she went out to see what was happening. As she opened the door a new voice began yelping, even louder than the parents.

A pecan-sized infant was under the shrub. Mrs. Clayton ran inside to get a tape recorder, but by the time she was back the mama bird had all the babies on the ground. Her wings were half-spread and all were huddled underneath her. As Mrs. Clayton came close the female flew a short distance, leaving the tiny babies to struggle through the lawn. The papa quail flew close, started calling and the babies joined him, and the female joined as the family began marching off single-file.

After they reached the pasture the mama spent five minutes “dusting.” Quail bathe by wiggling around in dirt and then standing up and flapping their wings. They wandered a little further and found sanctuary in a lotebush thicket. Mrs. Clayton went back to her chores, but an hour later heard a number of birds screeching and fussing. The lote thicket must have been the coachwhip snake’s home. The baby quail were in danger, so Mrs. Clayton saved the day again.

The covey stayed in the horse trap near the house the rest of the year. The following spring two quail came to the yard. One came to the sliding-glass doors and began pecking. The Clayton’s little dog went crazy barking at it, but it pecked for another several minutes at the glass. The two quail then picked at the potted plants, and turned over live oak blossoms on the ground for a good thirty minutes before finally walking over to a pair of cottontail rabbits nibbling on the lawn. Rabbits and quail joined together and walked back into the pasture.

Some folks might find it lonely and boring living out in the country. But how can a person be bored or lonely with such going-ons?