Quail hunting season begins this mid-October in California. People have hunted mountain, valley, and desert quail for hundreds of uncounted years across the Native American homelands of Southern California. While people often confine discussions to how Native Americans “used” quail for food and feathers, these ground birds have much more to teach us.
California Quail (Photo by Alan Schmierer / CC0)
Quail
By Pat Murkland
Quail help show us the relationship between people and all living things — for example how people regard plants, animals, and birds, how people name them, the traditions and beliefs that people practice, and stories that people tell about them. This can give us a deeper understanding of Native Americans living in the natural world before their beliefs and customs were compromised or ended.
Calling Out their Names
Quail, for example, are among the many birds that tell us their names in Indian, indicating how detailed the Native American scientific classification system once was. (Names are sometimes lost in translation when linguists are unfamiliar with birds.)
Male Gambel’s Quail at Joshua Tree National Park (Photo by Jarek Tuszyński / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0))
Gambel’s Quail
Gambel’s Quail (in Latin, Callipepla gambelii), the resident quail of the desert, is called qaxal by the Cahuilla. (1) This seems to incorporate the male’s loud and repeating caw-like song when seeking a mate.
Carobeth Laird recorded kakara and other slight variations in Chemehuevi. This seems to mimic the call of a Gambel’s Quail separated from fellow covey members. “The Chemehuevis have a great feeling for the quail, almost esteeming it as a tribal symbol,” she wrote. “It will be remembered that the highly prized kaitcoxo, mountain hat, was trimmed with rows of quail crests.” (2)
Listen via the Cornell Lab of Ornithology All About Birds website to the recorded songs and calls of the Gambel’s Quail here:
Mountain Quail (Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
Mountain Quail
C. Hart Merriam recorded the Cahuilla for Mountain Quail (in Latin, Oreortyx pictus) as kah'-hah-wit. (3) This seems to pick up the male bird’s distinctive “wit” whistle defined by Cornell ornithologists as repeated in either courtship or conflict.
Listen here:
California Quail (Photo by Gary Lindquist, courtesy of National Park Service)
California Quail
Their counterpart of valley and canyon chaparral, the California Quail (in Latin, Callipepla californica), repeats its name in Serrano loudly, over and over again: Kakata'! Kakata'! Kakata'! (4) Listen here:
Katherine Siva Saubel (Cahuilla) recalled a different interpretation:
“Qáxal … 'ét 'ívi' mu shkíktam 'ét 'íyaxwe michemnáqmawe' tuháyimani' chi’ pénga' métechem. Quail … when we were little we’d always hear all kinds of them.
Hémyaxwe' pé, “Nekáaka', nekáaka', nekáaka'.”
They (quail) say, ‘(Paternal) Grandparent, Grandparent, Grandparent.’
Pé pé' pén neyyíkawmaxish yáqa' pé', hémqay mán pemwáyniwe.
My mother, God rest her soul, used to say that they call for the, for their (paternal) grandparent.” (5)
Gambel’s Quails puffed up against cold, Joshua Tree National Park (Photo by Ed Dunens / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0))
Stories and Ceremony
Qaxal, the desert quail, plays an important role in the Cahuilla Creation story, in carrying wood to the Creator’s funeral pyre. The male quail to this day walks along the ground, pushing its head forward to peck at seeds and plants, with its distinctive round black topknot bobbing much like the bird is carrying a piece of wood. Francisco Patencio also named the Mountain Quail, with its tall, straight-up black head plume, as running to carry wood to the fire. (Quail rarely resort to flying.) (6)
Baskets woven and adding the topknots of quail were often used at the Cahuilla nukil ceremonies mourning the dead, and were burned in the ceremonies in honor of those who died, according to Lowell John Bean. (7)
Ernest Siva: Story of The Old Man and the Quail
Food and Resources
In older times, the Cahuilla caught quail, especially large coveys in fall and winter, with traps, snares, and throwing sticks. The birds were roasted, boiled, and wrapped in wet clay and baked. (8)
Although Katherine Siva Saubel had not seen her grandmother catching quail, she recalled, in Cahuilla, her telling about it:
“Pé' pé' 'iyaxwe pé'e' neysúlak pé' qaméxenuk pé' pén men, mehéhwanqa' pé'emi qáxalmi'.
My maternal grandmother, God rest her soul, used to, she used to trap quails.
Pén hichaxmi' 'umu' péqi' pé' meyáywannashpu' pénga' pé' héw'a' kúla'.
She would snare them all up in her net. …
Qahích'a' pé' ma sámatem pé'em pish péee, pewichuqa, qaméxenuk pé' mán 'éxenuk meyáywanqa' pé'emi'.
She would get reeds and, and intertwine them, and then she’d snare them.” (9)
Quail with chicks (Photo by I, Brocken Inaglory / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/))
Synchronized Hatching
Eggs also were eaten. A quail can lay 20 eggs, and sometimes quail lay their eggs in other quails’ nests, which are essentially basins in the dirt. Native Americans knew timing is important, because quails hatch in an amazing way. “Just before her eggs hatch, the female Gambel’s Quail calls to the chicks, who cheep to each other from inside the eggs. The eggs hatch in synchrony, with the chick cutting a neat hole in the largest part of the shell and leaving an intact piece of membrane to serve as a ‘hinge’ — the chick pushes on the shell and opens the ‘door’ that it has created.” (10)
After hatching simultaneously, the little fuzz balls literally hit the ground running, able to forage on their own with direction from the adult quail on what seeds, plant parts, and insects to eat.
Plants and rain offer the quail equivalent of birth control and regulate quails’ ability to lay eggs. In years of plentiful rain and abundant wildflowers, California Quail have good years in reproduction. Rains influence the chemistry of the plants (especially legumes) that quails eat. Some plants produce phytoestrogens or chemicals that are similar to hormones in reducing reproduction in birds and mammals. Some plants in drought years have higher phytoestrogens than in rainy seasons, when the plants are more plentiful. (11)
California Quail (Photo by Becky Matsubara of El Sobrante, California / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0))
Hybrids
California Quail and Gambel’s Quail look very similar. M. French Gilman of Banning (1871-1944), renowned ornithologist, documented the extensive range of the desert quail but wrote in 1907 that the three species can and often do occupy the same territory. “At Snow Creek at the north base of San Jacinto Peak I have shot the three species and carried them home in the same bag,” he wrote.
“Near Banning mixed flocks of [desert and California quail] … have been seen and the Plumed, or Mountain Quail as it is more commonly called, only a short distance away. In canyons at Palm Springs the three can be found, and on Pinyon Flats, altitude of 4,000 feet, lying about fifteen miles south of Palm Springs, I have seen the three species drink from the same spring in course of half an hour.” He then described how he saw what could be hybrids of the different species, which was bold for his era, but which modern ornithologists now say does happen. (12)
More on Desert Birds
Download and enjoy this pocket guide on desert quail and other birds of the Salton Sea area important to the Desert Cahuilla, from Torres-Martinez Band of Cahuilla Indians and National Audubon Society: BIRD GUIDE.
Notes
We thank the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for sharing quail information, calls and songs on the comprehensive All About Birds website.
1. The Torres-Martinez Band of Cahuilla Indians uses the orthography qaxal in this online bird guide developed with the National Audubon Society. Qáxal is used by Katherine Siva Sauvel and Eric Elliott, in 'Isill Heqwas Wáxish: A Dried Coyote’s Tail, 2004, Malki Museum Press, vols. 1 and 2.
2. Carobeth Laird, The Chemehuevis, © 1976 by Malki Museum Inc., Malki Museum Press, Morongo Indian Reservation, Banning, CA, p. 114.
3. C. Hart Merriam, Assembled and Annotated by Robert F. Heizer, Indian Names for Plants and Animals among Californian and other Western North America Tribes, © 1979 by Ballena Press, New Mexico, pp 189-190. Source listed as “Kah’-we’-sik subtribe. Recorded in Palm Springs region, Colorado Desert, October 24, 1907; November 10-13, 1909; October 1932; April 26, 1934.”
4. Ernest Siva, n.d.
5. Katherine Siva Sauvel and Eric Elliott, “What Quail Say,” in 'Isill Heqwas Wáxish: A Dried Coyote’s Tail, 2004, Malki Museum Press, vol 2, p. 1342.
6. Francisco Patencio and Margaret Boynton. Stories And Legends of the Palm Springs Indians, 1943, Palm Springs Desert Museum, p. 20.
7. Lowell J. Bean, Sylvia Brakke Vane, Sue Myers, and James Toenjes, “Cahuilla Ethnozoology: Database and Report on Sixteen Faunal Species found in the Cahuilla Territory,” prepared by Cultural Systems Research, Inc., January 2007, for United States Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management, Palm Springs, California, p. 12.
8. Lowell John Bean, Mukat’s People: The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California, © 1972 by the Regents of the University of California, 2nd, 1974, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, p. 61.
9. Katherine Siva Sauvel and Eric Elliott, “Trapping Quails,” in 'Isill Heqwas Wáxish: A Dried Coyote’s Tail, 2004, Malki Museum Press, vol 2, p. 1245.
10. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Gambels_Quail/overview
11. Paul R. Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye, The Birder’s Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds, Including All Species that Regularly Breed North of Mexico, © 1988 by Paul R. Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye, Simon & Schuster, Inc., pp 265-267.
12. M. French Gilman, “The Gambel Partridge in California,” The Condor magazine, the bulletin of the Cooper Ornithological Society, Vol. IX, September-October 1907, pp. 148-149.
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