{"id":168248,"date":"2025-05-15T06:12:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T12:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=168248"},"modified":"2025-05-15T11:29:47","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T17:29:47","slug":"an-intimate-look-at-some-california-quail-behaviors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/15\/an-intimate-look-at-some-california-quail-behaviors\/","title":{"rendered":"An Intimate Look At Some California Quail Behaviors"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first time I’ve ever photographed mating behavior in California Quail.<\/p>\n

Eight days ago I went down to the Jordan River, for the second day in a row, to look for the California Quail I’d found the day before. On that previous day there’d been three of them, a lone male with two females, but I never got any photos of the females and in the only photos I got of the male<\/a><\/span><\/span>, he was perched in shade in a tree.<\/p>\n

I knew that finding them was a long shot but it was the best shot I had.<\/p>\n

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After waiting patiently for a while, I got lucky. Here a female had popped out of the bushes and was running to my right.<\/p>\n

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She was followed almost immediately by a male – very likely the same male I’d photographed the day before. As they were running, they both stayed right on the boundary between shade and sunlight. They weren’t running from me (they were actually getting closer to me) but they seemed to have a destination in mind.<\/p>\n

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Their apparent destination was a cluster of what I call “dust bathtubs” – depressions in the ground that they had excavated in the past while taking dust baths. Here the male is in the largest and deepest of the four bathtubs.<\/p>\n

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The female was in a smaller bathtub, about a foot away from the male. They both scrunched down in their tubs, fluffed up their feathers and threw dirt over their backs, and elsewhere. More about that later.<\/p>\n

But at that point something unusual happened.<\/p>\n

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Faster than I could follow with my lens, the male popped out of his bathtub, mounted the female and mated with her – or at least tried to. Here’s part of what Cornell has to say about the mating process in California Quail:<\/p>\n

“the female raises her tail into a vertical position and the male grabs the nape of her neck with his beak.”<\/em><\/p>\n

But in this case, the female never lifted her tail and they never made cloacal contact. It’s my theory that she couldn’t<\/span> lift her tail, because the male was standing too far back on the base of it and she was in a hole, so the weight of the male was holding her tail down.<\/p>\n

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So the male just gave up. He let go of the nape of her neck and…<\/p>\n

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hopped off of her, without completing the “cloacal kiss”.<\/p>\n

By now you’ve noticed that piece of blue plastic. More about that damn thing in a minute.<\/p>\n

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It only took the female seconds to get back to her dust bath. Here she’s throwing dirt over her back, some of the shadows of which are evident on the male’s breast.<\/p>\n

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Just look at all of the dirt on her back.<\/p>\n

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I like this body posture of the female.<\/p>\n

Apparently the male could tell that the fleeting “magic moment’ was gone so he…<\/p>\n

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went back to his own bathtub and they both started throwing some serious dirt.<\/p>\n

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The male was a real excavator. There were times when I could barely see him because of all the flying dirt.<\/p>\n

After they both quit bathing and left the area, I went home and looked at my photos. The more I looked the more angry I became when I realized that that damn piece of blue plastic had despoiled the vast majority of my photos. At first I was angry at the plastic (now there’s an illogical emotion), then I became angry at the person who had discarded it.<\/p>\n

I ate lunch and then tried to take my obligatory afternoon nap, but at first I couldn’t sleep because it was at that point that I realized that I should have<\/span><\/em> walked over and retrieved the plastic after I was through photographing the quail. After I promised myself that I’d go down and retrieve it after my nap, I was finally able to sleep.<\/p>\n

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Later that afternoon, this is what I found – the piece of blue plastic partially embedded in the ground and the four “dust bathtubs” of varying size and depth.<\/p>\n

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And no, I didn’t forget to retrieve the plastic, which ended up in my garbage bin.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I’m a little late in doing the right thing but I like to think I usually get around to it. Assuming I think of it in the first place.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first time I’ve ever photographed mating behavior in California Quail. (14 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[393,334,2515,395,391],"tags":[7811,7812,477,7813,188,311],"class_list":["post-168248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bathing-bird-behaviors","category-birds","category-california-quail","category-miscellaneous","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-california-quail-mating-behavior","tag-california-quail-taking-dust-baths","tag-cloacal-kiss","tag-dust-bathtub","tag-jordan-river","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/california-quail-1281-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HLG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168248"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168307,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168248\/revisions\/168307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}