What do a golf ball and a quail chick have in common?
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
Are you a golfer? Well I am not really much of one, but I play occasionally for something social to do. If you are a golfer, do you ever try to hit your golf ball out of the deep rough? (dense grass and weeds for all the non-golfers) Where are you going with this you might be asking? A newly hatched quail chick is smaller than a golf ball and turkey chicks are slightly larger. A great test to see if you have suitable habitat for both species of chicks is whether or not you can successfully roll a golf ball or kick it along the ground where you expect those chicks to spend the first few days of their lives. The analogy has been around for a long time, I certainly didn't come up with it, but it is a great visualizer if you are looking at your habitat.
Bobwhite quail populations have an adult mortality rate of 75% to slightly more than that on a yearly basis. As has been said before, by a lot of people, "Lots of things like to eat quail." In order for quail populations to remain steady there has to be a large recruitment of chicks into the population every year. You can have the best habitat on the planet for adult quail and turkeys, but without quality and abundant nesting habitat located ADJACENT to great brood rearing habitat you are trying to win against odds that are never going to allow you to win. Back to the golf ball. If that golf ball can't easily roll along the ground, a chick is not going to be able to navigate that same habitat. A chick that can't reach bare ground shortly after hatching is more likely to die than one that can. Are plowed fields good chick habitat? Of course not, but bare ground is an essential ingredient in chick brooding habitat. In addition to that, habitat for brood rearing does need to provide overhead cover from aerial predators and some shade as well for chicks. Both turkey and quail chicks under 2 weeks of age have an extremely difficult type thermoregulating their body temperature. The ability to get into shade is very important as well as small areas that allow sunlight to reach the ground on cool days. Chicks that are still covered in down also need to be able to avoid dew soaked vegetation in order to remain dry.
What one vegetation type makes poor chick habitat, grass. Any habitat with a more than just a light level of grass, especially sod forming grasses quickly degrades the quality of chick brooding habitat. Fallow crop fields which were common in past farming practices often were ideal chick brooding habitat. Fallow field crop rotation is not a common practice anymore. So we need to actively incorporate that same type of habitat into our habitat management if we wish to see quail successfully use our properties.