When I was a boy we used to find quail in the hillsides around our home in Southern California. They were California quail, also known as valley quail where the bird’s range extends beyond the boundaries of the Golden State.
We didn’t know they were quail, or at least weren’t sure. We weren’t hunters, just city boys unknowingly blessed with an abundance of open space as our subdivision was surrounded by orange groves and rolling hills.
I remember a winter morning as we played in the abandoned orange grove next to our bus stop. One of the kids flushed a covey of 30 or so birds.
“Did you see all those chukar?” he asked as he came running back for the awaiting bus.
I’d seen the top knots and knew enough to know that meant quail, not chukar. Whether he thought they were chukar or quail was immaterial, I just remember the excitement I felt when those birds took to the air, like miniature helicopters lifting off from the weedy fringes of the old grove.
When that covey flushed the die was cast. I knew I wanted to hunt birds.
I’m old enough to have grown up without video games or cable television, so most of the days of my youth were spent in those hills. We’d use sticks as rifles and play Army or cowboys and Indians. Or we’d hike and climb on boulders for hours. Such play today would probably entail notarized waivers and adult supervision.
Though quail were there, we didn’t often see them. I remember once listening to a male perched at the top of one of our favorite climbing boulders. That lone male called “Chi-ca-go” all morning, but his lonesome cries went unanswered. Quail were scarce in dry years.
Then there were the monsoon years, when winter rains brought on by El Nino bombarded the region. When El Nino hit, the foothills would turn green with a blanket of cheat grass and ephemeral streams swelled in the arroyos. Quail seemingly sprung from the earth.
Things haven’t been so wet in California in a long time. In the years since I left I often return with my setters, walking the hillsides of my youth, but now with the dog’s sensitive noses as my guide. In the good years we almost always find quail.
Unfortunately, the record drought has taken its toll. The hillsides are bare dirt between the parched desert shrubs. It seems an impossible place for quail to make a living, and these hills are isolated now, cut off from surrounding open lands and the fertile Santa Ana River bottom by decades of home construction. My fear is that one day the drought will be so severe that all the quail will gone, and this could be that year.
The day after Christmas I walked a basin near a high saddle where I’ve always found birds. My setter Doll and I worked the ground hard, but quail seemed impossible in the dust.
I took a break on a west-facing hillside that for as long as I can remember supported a small grove of scrub oak. I climbed a medium sized boulder to rest and take it all in. Even a lone, unanswered cry of “Chi-ca-go” would have soothed the soul. But the air was empty of the sound of quail.
As I sat I noticed beside me a single tube of scat. The cylinder of poo was the right caliber for quail, and it was capped by a knob of white material where ureic acid is expelled by these birds which lack the plumbing to urinate, so only go No. 2.
I picked it up to examine it more closely, but before I could a gust of wind blew it out of my hand and off the boulder.
Maybe the birds will return, I thought. The country just needs a little rain.