First Broods....

P

Point!

Member
Went for a drive this morning as we're within a couple of weeks of peak pheasant hatch. The good news is that I saw three broods. The bad news is the number of chicks per brood was small.

Group 1 - Two adult roosters and 6 hens picking grit. Saw 2 chicks with group. Watched for 7 minutes hoping to see additional chicks. None seen.

Group 2 - Seven hens picking grit. Saw 1 chick with group. Watched for 9 minutes to see if other chicks joined. None seen.

Group 3 - Four hens picking grit. Saw 3 decent sized chicks. Watched for 10 minutes to see if other chicks joined the group. None seen. Chicks looked old enough to fly so tried to flush. Chicks capable of flying about 15 yards.

Guessing warm beautiful weather contributed to some early nesting. Late snow and cold wet weather may have impacted nests.

Point!
 
Thanks for sharing. I'm a little confused. Did the snow make it to NE Kansas? Certainly the cold rain would almost be as bad the snow.

Rain is wrapping up now. Thought I'll take a drive in an hour.
 
could be the few really early hatches lost some chicks to hypothermia, it seems to me that peak hatch should be still a week or 10 days away, and those broods won't be very visible for some time after that......hard to see peepers in any kind of cover....way too early to speculate the end results.
 
Jonjhawk said:
Can someone explain how that process works? Do they hatch their eggs than form broods?
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All the chicks basically hatch at the same time forming the brood. The hen will lay a fertilized egg a day and add it to the nest. Once the nest is full, the hen will incubate the eggs and that will take 21 days give or take. Sometimes with quail the hen will let a surrogate male incubate the nest while she lays another nest. Oklahoma biologists have seen quail hens recruit as many as two surrogate roosters to incubate the first two nests and she incubated the third nest. I hope I have a few hens like that at the Ponderosa. It is a beautiful world when the quail are being productive.
 
The other night about 7:30, I saw a hen quail with two males and a male/female pair on a gravel road. CRP on one side, corn sprouting on other side. They were on the corn side.

I assume the female/male do not sit on the eggs 24/7 during incubation. These birds were a hundred yards away from any trees. What's an incubating quail day's like?
 
M. R. Byrd said:
All the chicks basically hatch at the same time forming the brood. The hen will lay a fertilized egg a day and add it to the nest. Once the nest is full, the hen will incubate the eggs and that will take 21 days give or take. Sometimes with quail the hen will let a surrogate male incubate the nest while she lays another nest. Oklahoma biologists have seen quail hens recruit as many as two surrogate roosters to incubate the first two nests and she incubated the third nest. I hope I have a few hens like that at the Ponderosa. It is a beautiful world when the quail are being productive.
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Excellent answer MR! The % of nests incubates as 2nd and 3rd clutches for respective females is limited. If my old memory can cough this up, it's like 13 and 3%. Also, a brood is not a static entity. Family groups get together regularly and exchange members. This is one of the reasons why you may see different sized chicks in the same brood. I would guess rarely do you have a covey in the fall that is completely from 1 brood hatched together.
 
We saw our first pheasant brood of the year today. Around 12 chicks that looked to be near 1 week old. They were crossing the road from a recently planted corn field into one of our CRP fields that was burned about 6 weeks ago.
 
I did see a video from SC Kansas that had a hen and 13 chicks crossing the road. This was at least a week ago and they were not much more than a day old. I hope that the brood size is high for the remainder of the Summer.
 
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