Late Hatch?

P

PheasantWhisperer

Member
I've been into quail a few times this year already and I would say that 80 percent of the covies I have found have really young birds in them. And a couple of covies had a couple of big birds and the rest were all about 6 week old birds from my guesstimate. I have raised quail so have a good idea when aging them. I do find them every year but not to the extent that I have this year. Is this just a good late hatch in general? Or does this mean the early nests didn't work out and this is the 2nd or 3rd try? To be this young still the birds would have had to been hatched about mid to late September no?
 
Interesting that you said that. I shot 3 birds out of a covey on my place in W IL. Two of the birds I shot were noticeably smaller than the other. The bigger bird was a male, but I don't remember males being bigger in such a striking way before.
 
We experience a fair amount of this in Texas too. I've seen where they may not have a hatch in the early spring or lose one due to conditions and then turnaround and have a hatch into the summer. This year we experienced that with drought conditions in late winter and in spring followed by extreme heat this summer. I was amazed to see that some birds still managed to get a hatch out later summer/earlier part of the fall.
 
The age of these birds it would have to have been a mid to late september hatch. And the males aren't noticebly different in size from the females. If they were smaller they were young. Its hard to tell at first.
 
I have experienced similar results in OK this season. Most coveys have very young birds... I moved a couple on opening weekend that had birds who hadn't even developed their head colors yet. Got out of those quick. I've heard similar reports from KS. We move small birds on occasion in OK but this season it has happened way more than I can ever remember. I think it may have to do with April being so cold and such a late start to spring... plus the early hatch was terrible because of dry conditions from March to June. Then late summer rains were plentiful. They may have been working harder than normal to get some late hatches in.
 
Talked to a biologist in the Oklahoma panhandle a couple of weeks ago. He said they had birds killed opening weekend (11/10) that he estimated were around 9 weeks old. I hunt a ranch a little closer to home and they were seeing very small chicks there around Labor Day weekend.
 
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