Baby Quail

We have a lot of quail in our neighborhood. I mean a lot. They like to nest in the bushes and dirt in a few select places in our yard for some reason, and every time we walk out the front door they scurry away. There's even a one-legged little quail that hops away, a little slower than the others.

When we came home from Jackson Hole last Saturday, we found this in our window well:


Aren't they adorable? Four teeny-tiny baby quail, with their mama perched up on the roof, watching them nervously. The babies were stuck in the window well, and kept jumping up at the sides trying to get out. (I can't figure out how they got in there in the first place. Did she hatch them in there?) Every time someone walked nearby, they'd start chirping and running in crazy scared circles, and the mom would swoop down and fly past your head as a warning to stay away from her babies.

We decided to place a long board in the window well (it's really shallow) at a slant, so they could just walk up the plank and out to their mama. Genius, right?

A few hours later, they were still in there.

Apparently quail brains are even smaller than I thought.

We finally had to get a cardboard box and scoop them all out. Once we set them free on the lawn, the mama flew down from the roof and scurried off into the bushes with them.

Phew. Crisis averted.