Foster Rearing Button Quail II... A Female Learns to Rear Chicks

Abstract

S ome time ago I wrote an article for this publication describing an attempt to teach a female Blue-breasted (or Button) Quail ( Coturnix (Excalfactoria) cbinensis) to rear her chicks (Bent 1996). Briefly, this female would incubate her eggs for half of the normal 16-day incubation period and then abandon them. I finally removed a clutch of eggs to an incubator after they were abandoned, and when the chicks hatched r placed them with their mother in a suitably furnished thirty gallon fish tank to see if she would rear them. The experiment was a partial success - the female exhibited most of the normal caregiving behaviors and successfully reared all of the chicks given to her. Unfortunately, she never laid again, so I was never able to determine if she had learned anything from this parenting experience that might carry over to her next clutch. Since the female had reared the chicks alone, I also did not know if a male could learn how to care for chicks.

When this "educated" female died I was faced with the prospect of starting over again. In addition, I was faced with the problem of locating another female quail. Like many species of birds, Button Quail seem to come into and go out of fashion, and I was searching for birds in a "down" period in our area. After many fruitless phone calls I finally located some birds in one of the large chain pet stores. There was only one potential problem - the birds were all mutation colors. I prefer the normal, wild coloration for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I feel that the line breeding, inbreeding, and intensive rearing methods required to "fix" the new mutation colors is helping to create the well-documented loss of the birds'

brooding and chick rearing instincts (Alderton 1992; Hinze 1997, 1998). I Iowever, with no other choices and with an aging male, I chose the most normal colored female (a dilute brown "oatmeal") from the store and hoped for the best.

After a few months of courtship and pair bonding, the dilute brown female began to build nice nests in the silk plant thickets I provided and produced two large clutches, both of which she incubated for four days longer than the normal incubation period. Both clutches were unfortunately clear, and not long after the abandonment of the second clutch the old male died. Now I had a female who would build nests and incubate her eggs, but no male to fertilize those eggs.

A second frantic search again failed to turn up any quail anywhere - - except the same large chain pet store. This time they had no birds that even approached normal coloration, so I chose the calmest male available. This new bird, a red-breasted silver, began to court my dilute brown female immediately, and within a month she was incubating her third clutch. Unfortunately, she was lured off her nest by the constant courting of her

new young mate after five days, but when I opened the eggs I found that five out of her clutch of 11 were fertile. We were hack in business.

Only two weeks after abandoning clutch three, the female began to incubate clutch four, also containing 11 eggs. When incubating her large clutches it was amazing to see the hen's ability to flatten herself out, becoming a disk of brown feathers as she tried to cover all of the eggs. As later events were to show, she was apparently unable to fully warm such a large clutch.

This time she abandoned her clutch after 17 days, one day overdue. When I pulled the eggs and opened one, it contained a tiny, live chick, which appeared to he halfway through the developmental process. I immediately placed the remaining 10 eggs into a Hova-Bator thermal air flow incubator at 99.5°. I intended to give the resulting chicks back to their parents to raise.

As my initial experiment had shown, a basically naive female was induced to care for her chicks, even in isolation from her mate and presumably after any broody tendencies had subsided (since she had abandoned her nest eight days before the chicks

hatched). I felt that my current, presumably more "prepared" female quail would prove to he an even better mother, as she had shown herself to be very broody in her previous clutches.

Since the male was very gentle and calm, and had often joined her on her nest while she was incubating, I decided it was safe to leave him with new chicks. As Harrison 0975) pointed out, these quail show strong and persistent pair bonds, and the male takes a full share in the care of the young. I also decided not to pull the quail from the mixed-species flight that they shared with three species of finches into an isolated area, though I had done this in the prior experiment. I wanted to keep things as close to what the pair was used to as possible I could always fall back to moving the birds to an aquarium tank, or as a worst-case scenario, hand-rearing the chicks.

Three days after I had placed the eggs in the incubator, I candled two to check for development. On seeing absolutely no movement, l opened the first and discovered an approximately three quarter grown chick dead in shell. However, the second egg held an almost fully developed live chick with the blood vessels still showing, which I had to euthanize. I vowed not

to open any more eggs.

Four days after placement into the incubator, at 21 days into incubation, three chicks hatched. When they were dry, fluffy, and steady on their feet I placed them into the nest area in the flight cage. I also provided a heat lamp at that end of the cage so they would not become chilled. Within minutes of their placement in the nest, the active chicks had found their way out of the nest thicket. Meanwhile, their parent had cautiously approached the nest, possibly attracted by the loud peeping of the chicks. The moment of reunion was at hand.

When the chicks saw the adults they immediately ran towards them - at which point, their parents immediately ran away' The female particularly seemed very nervous, making quiet trilling distress calls as she kept as great a distance from the chicks as she could. The chicks were very persistent, constantly peeping and approaching the adults, even running after them if the adults ran. After an hour the gentle silver male suddenly began to make a loud mellow clucking note in response to the chicks, and then began to brood them.