From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Our Bird of the Month for this month are Buttonquail. These miniature quail are perfect to compliment a finch aviary.

The buttonquails or hemipodes are a small family of birds which resemble, but are unrelated to, the true quails.

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 (Paton et al., 2003; Fain & Houde, 2004, Paton & Baker 2006) 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 (Paton & Baker 2006).

This is an Old World group, which inhabits warm grasslands.

These are small drab running birds, which avoid flying. The female is the brighter of the sexes, and initiates courtship. The male incubates the eggs and tends the young.

All but one (the Quail-plover, Ortyxelos meiffrenii) of the 15 species are in the genus Turnix.

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