Garden & Gun has an article about a South Carolina family that is working hard to restore the wild quail population in the low-country. If you like conservation and/or quail hunting, you should read the whole thing.
It’s a fascinating process that attempts to replicate, as closely as possible, the special kind of adult-chick bonding and learning called imprinting. Before chicks even hatch from their eggs, they hear and recognize calls and sounds the hen makes, and this form of communication turns out to be critical for learning how to live as wild birds—including skills such as recognizing and avoiding predators. The novel Tall Timbers approach uses quail eggs collected from wild nests where the parent birds have been killed by predators or have otherwise abandoned the eggs. These eggs are incubated, and for thirty-six hours prior to hatching, recorded calls of parent hen quail are played to the nest, which helps synchronize hatching and begins the critical phase of imprinting. Once the young quail hatch, they are adopted by a parent bird and placed in an outdoor pen for about forty days.
Hopefully, this will be a success and catch on with other property owners.
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