Quail on my mind….

I’m not sure how many quail families we have living with us on the acre we call home. My husband and I are college math professors, and covid, with the unavoidable remote-teaching learning curve, completely derailed our plans to clean up the brush piles on the property and get everything looking tidy.

For two years (ok, probably more), our local wildlife has had almost free rein over our yards and gardens. I despise deer unless they’re leaving repeated huge deposits in return for their piracy. The rodents deserve personal nuclear holocausts for all the damage they do. But our quail are delightful!

Lately I’ve been hearing them calling to each other from their hunting grounds between our driveway and the canal (in the area where I destroyed the Mason bee wedding chapel last summer** ). Their calls even make their way around through my bedroom window at the back of the house, though I can’t tell from where they’re singing. Sometimes they use the Chi-ca-go song, but usually it’s a distinctive call that’s not what I’ve been conditioned to recognize as quail opera.

The quail have loved expanding their families under the multiple large branch piles or the protective canopies of the sixteen huge rhubarb plants dotting the property. They run across our parking area just because, or thunder away to the other side of the canal if our standard poodle, Rory, gets too close. They freak out and do the hundred-foot quail dash, topknots bobbing, if I open the gate to the orchard garden when they’re foraging.

Last year we used irrigation pipe sprinklers to water our back yard for the first time since we moved into the house nearly twelve years ago. It was a bit challenging to get the slightly bent lengths of pipe I found to fit together so that the sprinkler risers stayed upright, resulting in rather odd sprinkler paths at times.

One morning I heard a bird chorus and looked out my bedroom window to see a quail family running across the back yard, a long string of babies bumbling along behind as they cheeped. The sprinkler was angled wonkily that day, and it “attacked” them all, chasing along with them as they ran. They escaped the sprinkler’s clutches, disappearing between the house and shed toward the parking area, and I thought all was well.

Just a few minutes later, frantic cheeping started echoing from the back porch which lies between my bedroom and the wonky sprinkler. On further investigation, I found one chick searching for the rest of its family among our fleet of dead lawnmowers. When I scooped it up, and it quieted in the cave of my hands, another chick’s cheeping became audible.

We were pretty sure the family wouldn’t be coming back thanks to the loud and scary sprinklers (and we didn’t want to risk peeping, striped balls of fluff dying if we were wrong), so we took the babies inside, made them a cozy home, and started calling around to see if anyone local took in wild baby birds. Thankfully we found a lady who does wildlife rehab whose husband could meet us in the late afternoon and take the quail babies home for her to raise.

In the meantime, we got to enjoy their antics and absolute adorable-ness. They loved hiding in my daughter’s hair, curling up in or under her hand, and falling asleep on her chest. They put up with photo shoot after photo shoot.

Even Rory got in on quailsitting. She comes from a long line of standard poodle service dogs and takes to it naturally even without full training. She seemed to sense that they might need her on a moment’s notice, so after watching the babies for quite a while over the fence my daughter built, Rory lay down on the carpet, right next to the partition where she could hear if they needed her, and took a nap.

In order to understand that last statement’s significance, you have to know Rory well. She’s a princess of “the princess and the pea” sort. She’ll jump up, ready to act, at the slightest indication of movement by my daughter or me. But ask her to sit on gravel? Expect her to do her standing trick on the slippery kitchen floor even if t.r.e.a.t.s are involved? Ask her to lay down or stay down in the dirt or on pokey grass? Take her for a walk on-leash in the rocks along our road instead of off-leash around the field? Sleep on the floor when there’s room on a couch or in our bed, or even when there isn’t? Not on your life! How I wish I could have gotten inside her poodle head that day to learn what led to her decision to nap on the floor….

When it was time to deliver the babies to their new papa, we were all sad and almost wished we could raise them ourselves. Even Rory showed signs of withdrawal. This spring as the quail called around us, my husband commented, “I wonder what happened to our quail….”

(**See the “Knapweed – Mason Bee Musings” post for the wedding chapel story.)