Click to Enlarge Many spring mornings you can hear male (top left) bobwhites calling to females (top right). Both males and females will sit on the eggs unitl baby "bumblebee" bobwhites (bottom left) hatch. Quail need food to eat, cover to help them escape predators and brood cover, where they can raise their young. The best habitat for bobwhite quail is actually a variety of habitats situated in a small area. Quail numbers are declining because the birds can't always find good quality habitat.   Meet Mr. Bobwhite by Elsa Gallagher The Bobwhites 402 Briarbush Lane Farmland, USA I'd like you to meet Mr. Bobwhite. He is a small fellow, only as tall as a soda can. Despite his size, Missourians pretty much consider him King of the Gamebirds. I am speaking of course, about the northern bobwhite quail. In the early mornings of spring, you can often hear Mr. Bobwhite's call--ah bob-white. The male bobwhites make this call over and over hoping to attract a female bobwhite for the breeding season. Bobwhites prefer to live on farms. They don't move long distances like a turkey or deer. In fact, they usually live their entire lives within a mile of where they hatched. Male and female bobwhite quail are easy to identify by their colors. Male quail have a white throat patch and eye patch. The female quail has brown throat and eye patches. The female quail lays eggs over a 17-day period. One of the adults must sit on the nest for another 23 days until the eggs hatch. The male quail shares time sitting on the eggs. Baby quail, or chicks, are born precocial, which means they are ready to leave the nest as soon as they hatch. They are so small that people sometimes call them "bumblebee bobwhites." Chicks need a lot of bare ground to walk on and search for food. If these bumblebee bobwhites had to walk in grass as thick as your lawn, they would get tired really fast. They might even get cold and wet from the dew and die. After the chicks hatch, Mr. Bobwhite leads them to weedy patches. Quail chicks eat mostly bugs, but adults eat seeds, insects and some green plants. Favorite seeds include ragweed, "stick tights," korean lespedeza, corn and milo. Plant (forb) seeds provide quail with most of the nutrition they need. Bobwhites use a variety of habitats. Each habitat is very important to the quail's survival. A quail's feeding site is like your dining room. Their bedrooms are known as roosting sites. Brood rearing habitat is used to raise the chicks, just as your parents use the nursery with your baby brother or sister. And finally, quail need a place like the family room to just hang out and relax. Wildlife biologists call this "loafing cover." Quail also need escape cover. Escape cover is an area that has thick brush with bare ground underneath. Quail fly into escape cover to avoid predators. How these habitats are arranged on the ground is really important to quail. Quail need what wildlife biologists call habitat interspersion. Interspersion is when the different parts of the habitat are mixed together--like the colors in a bag of M&Ms. This short rhyme may help you remember some of the needs that quail have A bobwhite quail has many needs: insects, greens and forb seeds. On your next outdoor excursion, note how they need interspersion. It is easy to understand why quail numbers have dropped in recent years. Everything Mr. Bobwhite needs must be in a small area. Farms used to be smaller and had a lot of different types of habitat. Now it's hard to find all the habitats a quail needs in just one spot. They have to move around a lot more to find what they need, making them more vulnerable to predators. Quail are food for many animals. Snakes, mice, raccoons, opossums and skunks like to eat quail eggs. Larger predators like house cats, owls, foxes, coyotes, bobcats and some hawks eat both adult quail and chicks. Here is a short rhyme worth remembering about quail nests: A quail's life is full of tests. Many critters break up their nests. Possums, skunks, and raccoons, too. It's enough to make a bobwhite blue. Birds of a Feather Flock Together Have you ever wondered what this saying means? It means you hang out with people who are a lot like you. Quail do this because it helps them survive in the wild. Quail live in groups, called coveys, during the fall and winter. Coveys range in size from about eight birds up to 30, but the average covey size in Missouri is between 10 and 15 birds. Being in a covey increases an individual quail's chance of survival because there are more eyes watching for predators. Coveys also huddle together to keep warm when it's really cold outside. Where quail sleep is called a roost site. Quail choose different roost sites depending on the weather. In really cold weather, quail roost in sites that have tall grasses to block the wind. Often in the warm parts of fall, quail will roost out in bean fields or in really sparse grassy and weedy fields because they don't need the added protection of the taller grasses. Coveys group together at night by making a covey whistle, whit- whit-whit, that calls all the birds to the same area. They make a circle with their tail feathers on the inside and their eyes on the outside so that they can burst out of the cover in all different directions if a predator finds the roost site. The next time you're outside and you hear the ah-bob-white call, you'll know it's Mr. Bobwhite. While you're listening, take a look around and see if you can locate all the habitat "rooms" in his house.