Buttonquail

The buttonquails or hemipodes are a small family of birds which resemble, but are unrelated to, the true quails. They inhabit warm grasslands in Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Biology

Buttonquails are small, drab, running birds, which avoid flying. The female is the more brightly coloured of the sexes, and initiates courtship. Unusually, the buttonquails are polyandrous, with the females circulating among several males and expelling rival females from her territory. Both sexes cooperate in building a nest in the earth, but only the male incubates the eggs and tends the young. The eggs hatch after an incubation period of 12 or 13 days, and the young are able to fly within two weeks of hatching.

Taxonomy

Buttonquail were traditionally placed in Gruiformes or Galliformes (the crane and pheasant orders). The Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy elevated them to ordinal status as the Turniciformes and basal to other Neoaves either because their accelerated rate of molecular evolution exceeded the limits of sensitivity of DNA-DNA hybridization or because the authors did not perform the appropriate pairwise comparisons or both. Morphological, DNA-DNA hybridization and sequence data indicate that turnicids correctly belong to the shorebirds (Charadriiformes). They seem to be an ancient group among these, as indicated by the buttonquail-like Early Oligocene fossil Turnipax and the collected molecular data.

Species

Family: Turnidae

• Genus: Ortyxelos
• Quail-plover, Ortyxelos meiffrenii
• Genus: Turnix
• Small Buttonquail, or Andalusian Hemipode, Turnix sylvatica
• Philippine Buttonquail, Turnix worcesteri
• Sumba Buttonquail, Turnix everetti
• Hottentot Buttonquail, Turnix hottentotta
• Yellow-legged Buttonquail, Turnix tanki
• Barred Buttonquail, Turnix suscitator
• Madagascar Buttonquail, Turnix nigricollis
• Spotted Buttonquail, Turnix ocellata
• Black-breasted Buttonquail, Turnix melanogaster
• Painted Buttonquail, Turnix varia
• Chestnut-backed Buttonquail, Turnix castanota
• Red-chested Buttonquail, Turnix pyrrhothorax
• Red-backed Buttonquail, Turnix maculosa
• Little Buttonquail, Turnix velox
• Buff-breasted Buttonquail, Turnix olivei

References

• Sibley, Charles Gald & Ahlquist, Jon Edward (1990): Phylogeny and classification of birds. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn.

External links

• Buttonquail videos on the Internet Bird Collection
• cyberquail