WILDLIFE WEDNESDAY: GAMBEL'S QUAIL

How would you rebrand one of our most stylish birds?

Nov 29, 2023

A male Gambel’s quail moving at a sprint. Wikimedia Commons

The Gambel’s1 quail is probably my favorite bird living in Twentynine Palms neighborhoods. Or maybe it’s the roadrunner. Wait, I love the phainopepla, our goth cardinal. Cactus wrens are so feisty. Even ravens have admirable qualities—their intelligence and those beautiful glossy feathers!

Well, whatever. I like quail a lot.

And they’re very popular locally. So many roads and businesses are named for quail!

Tiny quail follow their parents to a water dish.

These plump birds are fun to watch as they hurry their broods to water and then scurry to safety, their comma-shaped forehead feathers bobbing. The males are so dapper with their black bellies, rust-colored caps, and black masks. The females are elegant too with that understated nubbin of a topknot.

Dad and his teenage quail. This fellow was raising his chicks alone.

And quail chicks as they grow up (not all of them do, of course) go from tiny walnut-shaped nuggets to teenagers with mohawks. They take dust baths and crowd into the divots they create while squabbling and shoving each other around. Kids!

My friend Maya Frank captured these birds’ elegance in her drawing.

You may have heard that about 80 North American birds are getting rebranded with descriptive rather than human names. Kenn Kaufman, author of bird field guides, said, "It's going to feel like a bother to some people, but I think it's actually an exciting opportunity to give these birds names that celebrate them—rather than some person in the past."

Cordoniz quail, from Spanish, has a ring to it. Cahuilla and Chemehuevi people have names for Gambel’s quail that sound like the boisterous calls males make: qaxal in Cahuilla and kakara in Chemehuevi. Wouldn’t one of these make a fine name?2

How would you rename these quail?

William Gambel (1823–1849) traveled west in 1841 when he was 18, becoming the first European American to collect and describe some western plants and animals. After adventuring for a few years, he studied medicine in Philadelphia and headed to the gold camps in California . He died at a mining camp near the Yuba River when he was 26.

More from the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center in Banning on Native knowledge about California’s quail.

Thank you as always for sharing your wildlife photos and videos; we’ll include them in a feature soon. Always looking for more Twentynine Palms wildlife! Email your files to deserttrumpet29@gmail.com

Desert Trumpet writer Kat Talley-Jones is a member of the Public Arts Advisory Committee, which is a part of the City of Twentynine Palms.

Share your thoughts in the comments below or in our live chat in the Substack app. Please note that we do not allow anonymous comments—include your first and last name in your profile before commenting. Anonymous comments will be deleted.

The Desert Trumpet

Discussion about this post