Mountain quail spreading their wings

Game bird populations can swing wildly.

Sometimes a wet spring and its resulting benefit to plant and insect communities can produce a boom. Sometimes the same wet conditions with a slightly different timing can wipe out young chicks and cause numbers to plummet.

The magic combination of conditions needed to produce abundant numbers of birds like chukars, gray partridge and valley quail seems to have occurred this year. There is even evidence that imperiled mountain quail have benefited.

“People who are avid hunters are seeing mountain quail in places they never have before,” said Joel Sauder, nongame biologist for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game at Lewiston. “It may be an uptick year.”

There is no open season on mountain quail. But hunters in pursuit of other game birds, most notably chukars and Huns, or those after mule deer and elk, are the most likely people to run across the native birds. They favor the steep and brushy canyons and draws found above the lower Salmon River and Snake River in Hells Canyon — places few people venture. In the summer they move up in elevation and can often be found in brush fields and ponderosa pine forests. They drop down to grasslands during the winter.

Sauder was a recent eyewitness of a mountain quail. He was after mule deer in Unit 14 when he spotted one of the birds on a rocky outcropping.

His encounter, combined with an unusual number of reported sightings from hunters, some of which came from areas not necessarily known to hold the birds, prompted Sauder to issue a news release. His aim is to remind hunters they might encounter mountain quail and that the species can be easily mistaken for valley quail.

“It’s hard to identify them on the wing, you have fractions of a second,” he said.

One key difference is their head plumage. Valley quail have a curved top knot — shaped like a question mark. Mountain quail head plumage is straight — more like an exclamation point.

Mountain quail have chestnut sides with strong, white baring that runs up and down. The bars on valley quail are less pronounced, more like scales, and tend to be more horizontally rather than vertically oriented. While both are small, mountain quail tend to be larger in comparison.

Sauder said the bird, which is classified as a species of greatest conservation need in Idaho, is a bit mysterious. Biologists don’t know why they are struggling in some parts of their range.

“They go all the way down to California. There are mountain quail in the Mojave Desert. They seem to be pretty adaptable,” Sauder said. “It always surprises me that our birds are not thriving better.”

Mountain quail are off limits to hunting in eastern Washington as well but they can be hunted on the state’s west side and throughout Oregon.

In a joint project, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife reintroduced quail on both sides of the Snake River in 2005. Some were released in Washington’s Asotin Wildlife Area and others in Idaho’s Craig Mountain Wildlife Area. The results of that effort are inconclusive.

“I wouldn’t say that it was success or failure,” said Sauder, noting that because of their size and the remote and difficult habitat they prefer, it’s tough to track them. “In general there is a lot of turnover in quail populations. We’ve always had mountain quail on Craig Mountain and the populations always ebb and flow. It didn’t really seem to make a difference and jump-start the population.”

Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com.