Barred Buttonquail

Fascinating facts about the Barred Buttonquail

• Barred buttonquails can be found from sea level up to about 2,500 m (8,200 ft) in the Himalayas, thriving in scrub jungle, light deciduous forest, farmlands and even old rice paddies, yet they completely avoid dense forest and desert. Their range stretches across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines and most of Southeast Asia. They remain common and are listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List.
• At just 15 cm long, the barred buttonquail weighs between 35 g and 68 g, with males averaging 46 g and females about 60.7 g, making the female noticeably heavier and more richly coloured. Their wing lengths range from 72-85 mm in males to 77-90 mm in females, and the male's tail is 35-37 mm while the female's is 33-41 mm. These precise size differences help birdwatchers identify sex in the field and illustrate the reversed sexual dimorphism typical of buttonquails, where the female is the larger, more dominant partner.
• Barred buttonquail females are polyandrous: a single female may mate with several males, but each male only incubates one clutch. The female initiates courtship with a loud drumming "drr-r-r-r-r" call, fights rival hens, and then builds a grass-lined scrape nest. After laying three or four speckled eggs, the male incubates them for about thirteen days, and the chicks run as soon as they hatch, becoming fully independent in roughly forty days.
• The barred buttonquail lacks a hind toe, a trait that separates bustard- and button-quails from true quails. Their blue-grey bill, yellow-white eyes and pale buff shoulder-patches. These diagnostic features, combined with their distinctive motorcycle-like "drr-r-r-r-r" call.
• Barred buttonquails are omnivorous foragers, eating millet seeds, fresh greens, insects and other small invertebrates, which they pick from old rice paddies, grassy plains and even deserted cotton fields. Their diet flexibility lets them survive in both natural savanna-type grasslands and cultivated farmland, contributing to their stable populations despite habitat changes.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia
• Animal Diversity Web

At a glance

Barred Buttonquail photographed on Feravox

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