The quail next door

The California state bird woke me up again.

It is early on the first of November, and I’ve only been sleeping for a few hours. But the quail doesn’t care. It’s in the toyon bush outside my window, singing its distinctive cry at the top of its lungs. Chi-CA-go, chi-CA-go, it hollers.

A little farther away, another answers. Soon it sounds like a quail convention. Rather similarly to chickens, quail tend to mutter a lot – a different sound from their cry, this mutter is somewhere between a coo and a cluck. It’s a sociable noise, and occasionally they try out the cry again. The emphasis varies, but the three-note pattern tends to stay the same. CHI-ca-go, CHI-ca-go. It’s loud. I roll over and put a pillow over my head.

The quail began moving into the yard shortly after I moved into my apartment. The last tenant had a cat; I don’t. The window by my desk looks out over a meadow of native grass, a madrone tree, a path of crumbled gravel. The quail love it. They sunbathe on the wooden steps of the porch, they wrangle over some exciting thing in the weeds, they scratch the small stones of the path.

Gradually, I realize that they are unexpectedly beautiful birds. The males’ bodies are an intricate extravaganza of browns and blacks and whites. Their curved topknots are jaunty, reminiscent of courtiers’ caps from another century. The females are smaller, browner and their patterns are more muted. They lack the bold black and white cheek stripes of their mates. Still, the mosaic of creamy scallops on their breasts is more striking than I’d noticed from photographs and their blurred explosions of flight across trails or roadsides.

Beyond their looks, these birds are somehow… charming. Full of personality. They move slower and are less fearful than other birds. Outside my window, they strut and flirt and squabble. They chase other birds. Once I watched a juvenile pecking curiously at the ants milling around near an anthill. Though they are usually vegetarian, this one seemed to be experimenting. It would peck the ground, hop when the ants bit its feet, and then peck the ground some more. This went on for quite a while, until finally the youngster learned to stand farther from the swarm. It was adorable, and funny.

Usually, when one quail is in the yard, there are half a dozen. They travel in coveys, and they arrive at all different times of day. They seem to be noisiest around dawn. This morning it occurs to me that I like their company best in the afternoon.