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Quail Habitat Basics

Quail require nesting, brood-rearing, escape and roosting cover throughout the year. A quail pair can, with adequate cover, produce up to three broods each season (typically from April to mid-summer). Nesting cover is mostly composed of native bunch grasses (broomsedge, little bluestem, big bluestem, indiangrass and eastern gamagrass). Quail usually make nests from 2- to 3-year-old dead vegetation. These bunch grasses, allowed to grow at least a foot, provide adequate overhead cover while allowing for some bare ground that facilitates ease of chick movement after hatching. What is required then is a mosaic of burned and unburned patches of habitat adjacent to one another that facilitate both nesting and brood-rearing. This scenario prevents adults and newly-hatched broods from traveling long distances to forage for insects. Ideal habitat will have brood-rearing habitat mixed within nesting habitat. Brood-rearing areas are made up of weedy species like ragweed and pokeweed, and native wildflowers like partridge pea, milkweed and sunflowers. Broadleaved plants attract insects, which make up 80 percent of a chick’s diet, and yet supply plenty of bare ground and cover where young quail forage. Ideal broodrearing cover would be a 2-year-old fallow crop field. Brushy, shrubby land is ideal for escape cover, especially in winter when there is snow or ice present. Ideal escape cover provides protection from severe winter or summer temperatures, and from wind and rain. This cover serves as refuge from predators. Escape cover, biologists have determined, needs to be at least a space that would fill a 10-footradius circle, and interspersed throughout a field so the quail doesn’t have to fly farther than 164 feet to reach any one clump. Quail roost in sparse vegetation that is 1 to 3 feet tall, composed of grasses, forbs and bare ground, and has an open canopy for easy escape flight. When winter comes, or when conditions limit the grass and forbs, quail seek woody vegetation more frequently.