Bobwhite quail are small, succulent, and randy, the hen a tender morsel of femininity with a heart rate so high that warmly nestled in my hand the bird conjures the bewitching memory of a young girl’s breast.
Someone once said, “A hen is merely the egg’s way of making another egg.” The book says that in terms of quail family-planning, the time span from romance to hatching is roughly fifty days: ten days for courting and building a nest, seventeen days for laying, and twenty-three for incubating.
In April the birds mate, the grass looks blue, the corn casts short shadows, and the blooming dogwoods underline the temporary fragility of the spring forest. Two months later, when the hatchlings abandon the warm, liquid safety of their eggs, the heat is that of a boiler room, the underbrush bursting, and the earth swollen from passing rains. The smell of a Southern summer benumbs me in its lustfulness. Rising from the forest floor like colorless fog, it exhales the lascivious breath of all the women I’ve ever dreamed of possessing.
The incubating duties of bobwhite quail do not rest altogether on the maternal instincts of the hens; the males, like their modern human counterparts, get involved. The hub of the couple’s world for almost two months is the nest, which remains unattended until the hen has finished laying an average of fourteen eggs at a rate of one a day. If the nest is destroyed the couple starts over, but the clutch grows smaller, following a pattern of diminishing returns. The incubating process begins when the last egg is laid, a three-week tour of duty that involves sitting and protecting the nest as well as turning the clutch over once a day to keep the embryos from adhering to the egg membrane. Eggs discharge carbon dioxide, which is not conducive to healthy embryos, so by nudging them the hens also circulate air through the nest. The nest is left untended during the couple’s meals. Berries are favored at that time of year for their availability and high sugar content. If the hen is killed, or for any reason abandons the nest—which happens often, particularly early on in the incubation—the male takes over the sitting chores and later the education of the hatchlings.
There have been insinuations of adultery among quail, a thought that pleases me a great deal, and one that telemetry—the application and monitoring of a small radio transmitter attached to a subject, in this case quail—will soon prove one way or the other. What we do know is that the species is basically family-oriented, possessing fierce protective qualities and good staying power. Percentage-wise, very few broods result from the couple’s first nesting endeavors. Incubating is a dangerous business, and predation, weather, farming, and the poor managerial practices of first-time parents affect the outcome, but because bobwhites are genetically forewarned of failure, they are also genetically programmed to renest two or three times a summer to ensure the survival of the species. These nesting failures, incurred early in the season, account for prime hatching time being late July instead of early June, if one counts backward to the whistlings of March.
For three weeks before entering the world, the embryo grows inside the inseminated egg, breathing the gases exchanged between the shell and the egg’s soft inner lining, twitching inside its cocoon, growing wings and feet and an oversized head. Hours before hatching the embryo deliberately moves its beak within striking distance of the shell and pierces the protective membrane, gaining access to its first gulp of oxygen; soon after it jerks backward, and the beak—more specifically a small tool known as an egg tooth—rips through the shell in the process called piping. With an unlimited quantity of oxygen now available the hatchling begins a counter-clockwise trip inside the egg, splitting the shell and emerging as a soggy, down-covered bobwhite quail. The process of birth lasts a matter of hours and is well choreographed in that a chorus of “clicking” sounds from inside each individual egg during the final hours of the embryo’s imprisonment alerts the rest of the clutch that birth is imminent. It is a program that prompts a basketful of one-ounce bobwhites to hatch simultaneously. As soon as the natal down is dry, the parents lead their brood away from the obsolete and dangerous nest into a world of equal unkindnesses.
Jim Buckner’s feelings on early hatches of bobwhite quail are pretty radical. “If I had my druthers, I’d step on every nest I could find, until the first of July.” The reasoning behind these heretical words is that the earlier quail hatch, the longer they are exposed to weather and predation. Mammalian predation intensifies during the summer months, as do the number and diversity of prey. Summer weather is intense and critical to the survival of the fledglings. Rain, hail, and floods account for most of the 50-percent mortality that occurs in quaildom during the first fortnight of life. The birds have the resilience of the rural poor: destroy their home and they build a new one. Therefore, in terms of survival, even though the later nest would contain fewer eggs, if those eggs hatched in September rather than June or July, the clutch would be exposed to less weather and less predation.
I visualized Jim scrambling quail eggs for the welfare of the population and asked him how his theory was received by the old-guard plantation owners who live and die by what is referred to locally as the “Thomasville tradition.”
“I don’t mention it,” he said without a smile.
All too familiar with the mind-set of the wealthy, I said, “Tradition is the excuse of small imaginations.”