Quail

Meet our state bird, The California Quail.  They do their best to be inconspicuous -- around here, getting noticed tends to get you eaten.  So the quail do a great job of blending in, becoming one with the scenery. 

Despite their wallflower tendencies, they can also be a noisy bunch when the mood strikes them, and their calls of "pit-pit-pit-pit-pit!" and a strident, "Chi-ca-go!" (some hear this as, "Where-are-you?")  echo throughout  the hills.


Accidentally flushing out a covey of 20-30 of them will certainly wake you up as they explode with a whirring of wings from the tree they were hiding in (this is even more exciting if you're on a horse that didn't want to be there in the first place).  But most of the time they're discretly melded into their surroundings, just hanging out, doing their brown, dappled quail thing.

Enter Bruce with his camera and brand new 300 mm lens.  And, snap, just like that, our little quail morphs into an elegant Jackie O, sheathed in a classic color pallet of gray, chestnut, and cream, with just a touch of black.

Sigh.  I never could resist a bird in a jaunty hat.