Released at 5 weeks they will fly from the brooder for short 5 to 10 yard hops and quickly go about covey calling to regroup. It will take them 3 days to move away from the immediate area they could see from where they were brooded and that spot will be the center of their home range.
Shown here is my lovely partner, Marcie, having the honor of releasing the birds. As a veterinarian she shares a respect and love for animals.
The released quail that were singles were approachable. Those that grouped up in as small of numbers as these four would quickly flush. Once in a larger covey they were inapproachable under any condition. Take note of their feathering being complete, un-pecked and with good tails after 5 weeks of outdoor brooding that started with 100, one day old chicks and releasing 87 in this example all within a 4x8 brooder. Well feathered quail to this degree are hard to come by from a game bird breeder. Even with the near ideal conditions of artificial heat source, dry cover, raised wire floor, readily avaible food and water as well as predator protection there still was a 13 chick loss. Compare that to what a hen brood of 10 chicks must face to survive.
While all this work may seem a bit much it should be remembered that success is measured in matters of degrees not quantum leaps. The goal is at lease 8 to 10 nesting pairs the next spring. To further facilitate that goal is the spreading of milo in the release area for easy to find food to cover the gap from the brooder feed trough to finding the quail feeding stations planted around the brood area. Accepting there is a benefit and consequence to every action all the work up to this point has been to place a lot of quail in a small area. These quail also have unrefined foraging skills. Instinct will quickly overcome these two issues by expanding the covey's home range and trial and success learning of what is editable. The spreading of grain is a gap filler until instinct fully drives the covey's behavior. Watching this "new" covey of 87 quail from day one of release through the summer is where this effort really became interesting. On days one and two of release the quail remained very close to the brooding site. By day 3 a noticeable departure was observed with less than half of the quail observed in the area around the brood site. By day 4 no quail would be found within sight of the brood area. From day 4 to about 10 we made random searches around the 40 acres or so around the original brood site. What we found had an immediate effect on us. The 87, 5 week old quail had broken up into 10+ to 20 (+>5-8) bird coveys and separated like spokes on a wagon wheel in random directions away from the original brood site. This brood separation appeared to be random and regardless of the cover type. The result was those quail coveys that went to the better habitat survived longer than those that went out of the recent habitat development area and were preyed upon until extinguished before the end of summer. What we learned in this one instance is the 8 acres of field habitat spread over 16+ gross acres developed by clearing brush across four separate small fields separated by a intermittent stream and its tributaries timbered with hardwoods was not sufficient in size to "capture" within it the 87 quail. One covey of around 20 quail flew out into and occupied a field we had cleared of brush and small trees that once opened to the sun allowed the tall fescue (planted by the previous owner for cattle forage) to flourish and make its well know thick and homogenous carpet of leaf and stem. This field was scheduled for the following year to be sprayed and planted with quail supporting grass mixture. The covey simply beats us to that field before we had time to develop it. This covey lasted for as long as it took a hawk, believed to be a coopers hawk, to feed on it to extinction. This hawk tookl perch in a single tree left standing near the barn at the edge of the field where the covey anchored itself. Another covey crossed the property line onto the neighbor's cattle pasture and headquartered on a drainage with thin hardwood tree cover. That covey too lasted until prayed upon and extinguished presumably due to the limited ground level protective cover. A third covey and one surviving until the following March breeding season covey break up traveled down the length of the larger stream bed to an area of marginal quail ground cover composed of various grasses, brush, hardwood and cedar trees. Interesting and disappointing at the same time of the 8 acres in developed quail ground level habitat not one covey selected any of those four fields for their home center or headquarters although most were close enough to to one or more to have included it in their daily maneuvers. Most of the coveys that is except for the one observed to survive until the following March covey break up. The remaining coveys or quail seemed to dissipate without any reliable or repetitive observation of their survival or extinction. Our lesson from this one habitat development and brood experience is to greatly increase the size of the habitat development somewhere in excess of 16 acres and less than 40 before brooding another covey jump start in this locality.
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Some of the released quail probably 20 minutes after release and an instant before flushing away - we were lucky to get this picture. And, an interesting point.
