During my childhood years in Northern California, I often encountered families of Quail scurrying through my outdoor playgrounds. We lived in what was then a remote western town with Hwy 101 running through it. Our house was on the semi-rural outskirts of town with a hillside in front of us and a forest behind us. Cattle fields were nearby with faery rings of redwoods at the top of the hillside where we played. Creeks filled with salamanders and clay bullets and water snakes offered cool resting spots for my sister, my dogs and me. We would pick miners lettuce for dinner salads and blackberries and wild apples as snacks. More often than not families of deer would freeze in our paths and then wander away. And, cute families of quail were always scurrying out of the undergrowth ahead of us with Daddy bird’s little decorative cap leading the way.

As I was measuring a new client’s site just north of Seattle, I heard the familiar peep of California quail in the overgrown weeds of her recently clear-cut site. (I can’t talk about the clear cut; its way too depressing and all-too-common in her area.) I watched the weed tops as the quail moved through them and caught a glimpse of the colorful adult male and then the duff colored female adult. But, it was obvious an entire family was with them. Too many tiny peeps to be a couple alone on a date.

I moved away from the area where they were hiding and went to work in another spot. Later, they caught my eye again. And, try as I might to capture a photo, they all eluded me. Eventually, quite camera shy, they returned to the blackberry and other brambles in the creek, leaving me alone in the weedy field that had not long ago been a forest of Pine, Doug Fir and Hemlock. I look forward to help design a native garden to help rebuild the habitat, offering the quail and other wildlife (as well as the homeowners) something more to live in and feed from than a sorry field of nipplewort, dockweed, braken fern and stinky bob.