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In a sense, valley quail are easier to hunt than some animals because they aren't as difficult to find.
Find a relaibale source of surface water out in the wild country, and there is a very good chance that you'll see a covey
of quail, or perhaps even more than one, somewhere nearby. Not only is there a good chance that you'll see quail,
but there is a very good chance that you'll hear them, too. Valley quail are very "vocal" creatures and this
helps make them them comparitively easy to find because you do not rely on sight alone to find them, but also on hearing.
The Assembly Call
The most common call made by valley quail that the hunter will hear is the assembly call.
This is the "chi CA go" commonly heard in quail country, and the one which most commercial mouth calls marketed to valley
quail hunters seek to imitate. As the name implies, it is used to gather the covey together. It is usually given
by a "sentinel bird." The sentinel will be a male, and usually one of the larger ones in the covey. He will
often be perched on a shrub, bush, limb, or rock when he vocalizes this call.
Some things to consider:
1) Quail have their own unique voices. There is scientific evidence to support the view that quail can recognize
the "voices" of their covey mates.
2) The individual birds in a covey do not always respond to assembly calls they hear. They may not
respond at all to calls given by members of other coveys. They may not always call in response to the male sentinel
3) Commercial mouth calls marketed to hunters also have their own unique voices -with individual variations found among
those of the same make and model.
Defying Darwin
Quail are social animals that do almost everything in a group. They have a very powerful, instinctive drive to maintain
the integreity of the covey. The covey helps protect its individual members from predation in several ways.
With more than one set of eyes on alert for danger, there is a greater chance that danger will be spotted. When
it is spotted, the confusion of the flush of an entire covey helps protect individual members from falling victim to predation.
Consider the difficulty that some hunters have on focusing on one bird during a covey flush, and you have the picture
of how this works in practice, because humans aren't the only predators who have this difficulty. Cooper's hawks have
trouble picking out singles from a covey flush, too.
The assembly call helps maintain the integrity of the covey because it allows any birds that may have been seperated from
it to re-locate it and re-join it.
Curiously, valley quail tend to be most vocal at times when they are the most vulnerable to predation. They do not
see very well at all in the low light conditions before sunrise or near sunset. Sight, however, is their primairy means
to detecting predators.
In low light conditions, sight isn't a relaible means of maintaining covey integrety, since quail don't see well under
such conditions. This is why they tend to be more vocal very early in the morning and later in the day. In a sense,
this flies in the face of Darwinism, because under the kind of low light conditions in which quail are most likely to call
and in which their ability to detect predators by sight is the most compromised, many of their predators can not only see
quail better than quail can see them, but they can also hear them.
Some things to consider:
1) The assembly call is a mechanism for maintaining covey integrity
2) It is "a call to order" signaling that the covey is about to move out to a different location to water, feed, dustbathe,
siesta, or roost.
3) It is also used to maintain the integrity of the covey while it is in transit.
Conflicting Instictive Drives
Although quail have a powerful, instinctive drive to maintain the integrity of the covey, I believe they have another
instintive drive that over-rides this one and conflicts with it.
This conflicting instinctive drive is that of turning plant matter into protein. This is the main reason why quail
exist, in the grand scheme of things. They tend to be very effecient in terms of balancing calorie intake with that
of calories consumed. Part of this effeciency is found in the fact that individuals in a covey are not in direct competition
for the available forage. While they do everyhting else as a tightly-knitted group, they tend to disperse during feeding.
After dropping from the roost, valley quail may or may not go to water, depending on the weather. Early in the
season, when the weather tends to be hot and dry, they will go to water immediately. Later, particularly in the aftermath
of a winter storm, they may skip going to water.
If they skip going to water, they will head for a feeding area. Otherwise, they will head for the feeding area after
watering. Either way, they will normally spend the first hour feeding intensively. After this initial period of
intensive feeding, they will feed on a sporadic, "off and on" basis for 1 to 4 hours, depending on how much available light
they have to work with during the course of a day.
Some points to consider:
1) Quail will tend to be dispursed during their feeding time and largely driven to consume calories, rather
than remaining tightly coveyed up.
2) Dispursal during feeding limits direct competition for available forage, so there is temporary advantage in a
loosening of the covey bond during the feeding period.
3) The feeding period ordinarily consists of one hour of intense feeding followed by a variable duration
of sporadic feeding activity, and during this feeding activity, quail are less compelled to call.
4) When their crops are full, the instinctive drive to turn plant matter into protein subsides, and the drive to maintain
the integrity of the covey takes over. At this time, quail may be heard to vocalize their assembly call, as part
of gathering together to head for suitable loafing cover.
The purpose for the use of loafing cover is to allow the birds to rest under the security of the covey while digesting
the contents of their full crops. If they are already in loafing cover, they are typically assembled, so their
is no need for an assembly call. Once the contents of their crops are digested, these empty crops need filling again.
Points to consider are:
1) In mid-day light, quail see well enough to maintain visual contact with their covey mates.
2) They are very likely to have coveyed up during the middle of the day to take advantage of the security that the covey
provides while digesting the contents of their crops.
3) Since they can see well and they are already assembled, there may not be any compelling reason for the sentinel bird
to vocalize an assembly call when leaving the loafing cover to commence the afternoon feed.
In my experience, this is part of the reason why some hunters insist that quail will both give and respond to an assembly
call at mid-day, while others insist that they will not. In the case of the latter, I believe that their conviction
is the product of reliance on empirical evidence or, in this case, the lack of it. They've never heard quail call during
the middle of the day so they assume that quail never use an assembly call during mid-day hours. I beleive this is a
false assumption because I hear them call during mid-day hours throughout the year, and thus throughout the hunting season.
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The Measure of Effectiveness
Mouth calls marketed to hunters are effective tools for quail hunting. Many hunters, however, only gauge the effectiveness
of the use of such devices on whether or not such use illicits an immediate vocal response.
Points to consider:
1) Quail do not always respond to assembly calls vocalized by covey mates.
2) Since they don't always respond to covey mates, it is logical to expect assembly calls vocalized by hunters to
go unanswered.
3) A lack of a vocal response is not the same thing as no response
4) A vocal response is not the sole measure of effectiveness of a hunter's mouth call.
Bear in mind that the assembly call is exactly that. It is more of a "command" than a "question."
In other words, the "chi CA go" call is like the valley quail's version of a USMC "Gunny" commanding recruits to "fall
in" with any vocal response being akin to "Sir, aye-aye, Sir." It isn't like one quail asking another "Where
are you?" with the oter saying, "Here I am." Because of this, the main response is action, rather than acknowledgement
or vocalization.
I have seen this in action while hunting with the administrator of this site. Once, while hunting around the Lottie
Portero Campsite in the Los Padres National Forest with his air rifle, he spent about 40 minutes calling with no response.
I thought this was silly until I forced myself to consider the above. He didn't get a vocal response, but he did get
the response that he really wanted, which was that of having the quail come to him. He sat motionless in the
shade of an oak and called a covey of 30 birds out into the middle of a grassy flat, except for one male, which perched
itself on some brush, and proceeded to look around for the source of the call, eventually responding to it with a half-hearted
call of his own. He managed to get four that way, and then, after waiting a half of an hour, he did the whole thing
over again, letting me have a turn at hitting them with his .20 R-1.
The "Silent Treatment"
There are many reasons why quail will give hunters "The Silent Treatment" and most of them don't have anything to do with pressure
from sport hunters.
While the administrator of this site and I have a long-standing debate over how much sport hunting affects the behavior
of quail, our dispute isn't one of whether or not but of how much. We both agree that humans with
shotguns who chase the same coveys of quail around every week-end for the entire season should expect the pressure put
on the birds to alter their behavior compared to unpressured birds. In areas that get pounded, you will notice
that the birds will flush farther out, run farther from you, more quickly head for the thickest cover, and call much less
as the season progresses.
It might not be humans, however, that are doing the most "pounding" on a local population. Cooper's hawks will have
the same effect. If you happen to see one of these brids lingering in your hunting area, it is entirely likely
that you will not see or hear any quail. Even if the hawk just passes through, doing so will typically cause quail to
hunker down and remain silent, sometimes for as much as an hour after it has left the area.
Weather is also a factor that will cause quail to give you "The Silent Treatment." When the weather is damp, or even
sometimes when the sky is heavily overcast, or when it is particularly windy, quail will remain on the roost much longer than
normal, sometimes not coming off the roost until after sunrise. Their feeding behavior under these kinds of conditions
tends to change, too, in that they may feed sporadically througout the day, and dispense with their mid-day covey-up all together.
In wet weather, they may not go to water at all, and they'll be staying very close to cover.
The point is that observing the effect doesn't always prove the true cause. If, for example, you arrive near a known
roosting area in the grey light before sunrise, but still within legal shooting hours, and start tooting on your call and
do not receive a response, the reason for this might simply be that the birds aren't ready to drop from the roost due to weather-related
factors. Here, the observed effect is the same as it would be if an area was getting pounded hard by hunters -very quiet
birds that don't vocally respond to your call.
Let's say that you keep on hunting, and you keep on blowing on your call, and you continue to get no vocal response to
it. This could be due to the presence of Cooper's hawks, or the weather may have altered their feeding behavior, causing
them to spend more time during the day in a dispersed state. Human hunting pressure may not have much to do with the
fact that you're getting "The Silent Treatment."
In spite of all of the other things that can cause quail to remain quiet, a surprising number of hunters will toot a call,
conclude that the lack of a vocal response means something that it really doesn't, and move on. They'll operate under
the assumption that human pressure is the only cause for silence on the part of quail, and they may miss out on some opportunities
to shoot a few, as a result.
Sure, the silence of late season quail can be vexing at times, but as I've mentioned before, silence isn't the same as
no response. You can still call an entire covey to you, even in the middle of the day at the end of the season, whithout
ever getting a vocal response. Knowing this, if you can't find birds by going out and looking for them, it might pay
off to let them come looking for you.
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