What's for Dinner

One of the first things I do when I take a quail from my setters is to palpate (i.e., feel) the crop to see if it has much in it. I'll make you this wager . . . a blue quail will always have 2 to 3 times more volume of food in its crop than a bobwhite, regardless of the time of day.

The birds I've examined thus far have contained a lot of greens (e.g., filaree), some broomweed seeds, and not much else. Note that my lease doesn't have hardly any western ragweed; I've heard from some of you that your birds' crops are stuffed with seeds of ragweed by 9:30 a.m.

I did see a "first" on a hunt in Borden County recently. We shot 35 quail (most of them blues); at least 2 of the blues had maggots in their crop. I know quail will consume desert termites (albeit not in proportion to their abundance), but I'd never seen maggots in a crop before. Reckon those birds had feasted at a road-kill diner!

As you dig through quail crops, you can identify the more important seeds by comparing them to an online seed collection at http://teamquail.tamu.edu