| Quail-plover | |
|---|---|
| |
Scientific classification 
| |
| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Charadriiformes |
| Family: | Turnicidae |
| Genus: | Ortyxelos Vieillot, 1825 |
| Species: | O. meiffrenii
|
| Binomial name | |
| Ortyxelos meiffrenii (Vieillot, 1819)
| |
The quail-plover, lark buttonquail or lark-plover (Ortyxelos meiffrenii) is a small ground-living bird in the buttonquail family Turnicidae that is found in the Sahel region of Africa and in a disjunct region of East Africa. It is the only species placed in the genus Ortyxelos.[2]
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How to Build a Scent Station to Detect Quail Predators: An Experiment for Kids
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Quail Posts - South Texas Quail Nest Predators - Texas Wildlife Association
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Transcription
Howdy! My name is Mikayla. Have you ever walked along a trail in the park or while you were camping and seen a print in the dirt or sand and wondered what animal made that track? Well, wildlife professionals who are concerned about Texas quail wonder the same thing. They set up Scent Stations to find out what potential predators, or animals that like to eat quail or their eggs, and see if they are in an area. The stations are set up in areas where quail have been seen and the tracks left behind are usually animals that would most likely threaten the quail. It’s called a scent station because a potential predator is attracted to a scent tablet, or in our case, bait. They then walk over an area of dirt covered in flour to get to the bait and leave their tracks as proof. A track identification guide with animal tracks can then be used to find out who made the track and if they are a possible enemy of the quail. To get started you need to print out the directions on how to build a Scent Station. This can be found on the Kid’s Section page next to the Scent Station button. Since you have the directions, you should also have the materials needed to build your own station. Let’s check and make sure I have everything I need. I have a 3-lb bag of flour, my hula hoop, and my bait. Today we will be using salmon. I already checked the weather to make sure it would not be raining over the next two days. Rain can easily destroy the flour and make the tracks unreadable. Now that I have everything I need, let’s go find a spot for my scent station. You need an area large enough to lay down the hula hoop and ideally your scent station would be set up near a trail that animals use. If you find a perfect spot but there is tall grass, ask an adult to use a weed eater to clear out the grass so you have a smooth surface. This spot looks pretty good, I'm going to clear anything out of the way that might mess up the flour, to make sure my area is as smooth as possible. I’m trying to spread it out as even as possible but it needs to be about a half-inch thick. When your done spreading the flour you want to make sure that it is smooth so you can tell whether or not a predator has been here. You can bring a small broom or use your hand to smooth out any areas the are really uneven. Before I leave I want to make sure that things will actually be able to leave tracks. I'm going to use the Knuckle test, just push down into the flour and I can see my own prints, so I know that predators will leave a print to. Next comes the bait, it is important to leave the bait in the middle of the circle so the animals have to walk through part of the flour before they can get to it. The smellier the bait the better. Voila! This scent station is ready. Rise and shine! Today is day 1 after setting up my scent station. Let’s go see if we had any tracks. I better grab my camera and materials just in case! It looks like we had a visitor last night. And they ate all of the salmon! I’m going to take a close-up picture of the tracks so I can look it up in my track identification guide. If you don’t have a guide, you can look it up online, with your parent’s permission. We have one more day left so I'm going to go ahead and add some more salmon and smooth out the flour to make sure that we still get good results. Go ahead and do that knuckle test one more time to be sure my prints show up and were good to go for the day. Alright folks its been two days and I'm ready to go check out my scent station again. I went ahead and brought my camera and track ID just to in case there are any tracks. Looks like we got another one, once again all the salmon gone. Im going to go ahead and take some close-up pictures so I can check them out later on. Its important that when your done with your scent station to clean up all of your materials so that it looks just like it was when you found it. I have a trash bag and a scoop I'm going to clean up with and then we will go back and check out these prints online. so these are the pictures from day one, it looks like what we had in our scent station was some kind of raccoon. On day two we had a different animal, that one was actually a cat. I'm not sure how often wildlife professionals come across cats at their scent station, but I do remember reading that raccoon are predators of quail eggs. So we did at least catch one enemy of the quail. With my parent’s permission, I’m going to post these pictures on the Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences’ Facebook page. I hope you had a good time. Now it’s your turn to set up a Scent Station. Good Luck!
Description
The quail-plover is a small, short-tailed cursorial bird which looks a little like a miniature courser when on the ground. The upperparts are a sandy-rufous colour and the underparts mainly whitish. They show a distinctive wing pattern in flight when the contrast between the white primary coverts and the black with white-tipped remiges to form a distinct diagonal band on the upperwing. Its fluttering flight style is rather lark-like. The females are slightly darker than the males while the juveniles are paler.[3]
Distribution and habitat
The quail-plover occurs in Sahel from southern Mauritania and northern Senegal eastwards to northern Cameroon and southern Chad[3] into South Sudan and southern Sudan[1] with separate populations in northern Benin and coastal Ghana,[3] with another in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.[4]
Behaviour
The quail-plover is usually found singly or in pairs in dry grassland and thorn scrub. It is rather skulking preferring to move stealthily through grass but also running around like a courser in the open. Tends to crouch down and hide when approached and flushes only when the observer is almost on top of it and then flies off with a jerky undulating flight. It breeds during the dry season and moves north ahead of the rains[3] It tends to be more active at night and to call with a soft low whistle like the wind going through a pipe during moonlit nights.[5]
Conservation status
The quail-plover has an extremely large range, its population trend is not known, the population is not understood to be undergoing a sufficiently rapid decline to approach the thresholds under the population trend criterion while the population size has not been quantified so the species is evaluated as Least Concern.[4]
References
- ^ a b BirdLife International (2016). "Ortyxelos meiffrenii". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2016: e.T22680603A92867780. doi:10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T22680603A92867780.en. Retrieved 13 November 2021.
- ^ "ITIS Report: Ortyxelos". Integrated Taxonomic Information System. Retrieved 11 August 2014.
- ^ a b c d Borrow, Nik; Demey, Ron (2001). Birds of Western Africa. A & C Black. p. 408. ISBN 0-7136-3959-8.
- ^ a b "Quail-plover Ortyxelos meiffrenii". Birdlife International. Retrieved 17 October 2016.
- ^ Zimmerman, Dale A.; Turner, Donald A.; Pearson, David J. (1996). Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania. Christiopher Helm. pp. 372–373. ISBN 0-7136-3968-7.
This page was last edited on 1 January 2024, at 13:03