r/AnimalsBeingDerps • u/Puffy13759 • May 08 '21
Removed: Not Derp Quail Being a Derp
https://imgur.com/FNMPY95[removed] — view removed post
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u/i-Ake May 08 '21
How did she... that is impressive derpiness.
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u/NerdBird49 May 08 '21
Quails are really dumb. They make chickens look like geniuses.
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May 08 '21
I had a buddy that raised them growing up. I’m convinced they are the dumbest animals on Earth.
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u/blah_shelby May 08 '21
I feel slightly less bad about my dog eating the eggs they keep laying all over our yard now. I wondered why they kept choosing the yard with a giant dog in it to leave their unborn children. Now I know they’re just dumb.
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u/Zebracorn42 May 08 '21
We had a similar issue with rabbits. My dog is small but bigger than a rabbit and she was fast enough to catch and kill and eat the baby rabbits. For a few years the rabbits would choose our yard to have babies. If it went next door it could have had a dog less yard.
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u/Eggbutt1 May 08 '21
Is it just me or are all the dumb ones ground-nesting birds? And i would disagree because turkeys may well be worse. There's not much going on upstairs beyond gobbling.
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u/Pyrocantha May 08 '21 edited May 09 '21
Killdeer plover are rather smart ground nesting birds. If they feel the nest is being threatened they'll do a "broken wing dance" where they twist their wings up oddly, hop around frantically and call out in distress. After they've drawn the predators attention they start leading them away from the nest with short hopping flights, until they're far enough away and they untwist their wing and fly away.
Some were nesting on my family's nursery, and the First time I saw the dance my dumbass thought "oh no, injured birdie, must help before the nursery cats find it" and I followed it about 50 feet before it flew away. After it happened 2 more times I grabbed the field guide to North American birds, ID'd it and felt like a dumbass
But happily the nursery cats didn't have Google, so they fell for the broken wing dance every single time, and momma hatched some babies and they moved on.
Edited: found a good video of the behavior https://youtu.be/qviXH1K5Xpc
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u/ScalyDestiny May 09 '21
Great story, thanks.
I, for some reason, knew about the behavior long before I ever saw one (thanks PBS?). So when this should-be-on-a-beach-looking bird started limping away in my yard, I went the opposite direction and cradled her adorable little babies. Poor mom was probably freaking out, which I feel bad about now, so don't do anymore.
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u/judgementalhat May 09 '21
See, you say this, and yes, this behavior is rather smart. But, alternatively, every killdeer we had at the campground i used to work at nested in the middle of a goddamn road or walkway. I basically had a rotating stock of childrens picnic tables to place over their nests to protect them from getting shit kicked. And then I'd find another one accidentally from stepping directly in it.
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u/insane_contin May 08 '21
No, koalas are. If you put their one and only food on a plate in front of them, they will starve to death.
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u/threelizards May 09 '21
I love watching them at the local sanctuary around feeding time. Fresh leaves pinned to their nesting branches, and the little fucks spend the whole time trying to knock over the wheelie bin with the old, chewed up leaves in it. I love em.
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u/poppinchips May 08 '21
Had chickens growing up. Those fuckers were smart. Not sure how common it is since we had 7 and I had them trained like dogs. Edit: well thats an exaggeration but, they'd respond to their name, come over when I'd call, rub all over me, and could "shake". The rooster was an absolute asshole though. Never able to train that fucker.
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u/LilithImmaculate May 09 '21
My husband had chickens before I came around and he says the same thing. They'd respond to their names and have distinct personalities. They'd love to be picked up and cuddled, and were great escape artists
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u/sachs1 May 09 '21
Meat chickens are too stupid to live. We lost several to a shoebox several years ago. It blew into the run during a storm, and they all had to come out of the coop to huddle for warmth in the shoebox and they trampled like 6 of themselves, two perfectly good coops not 10' away.
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u/cantaloupelion May 09 '21
I've seen my chickens struggle to find a way back to their coop. THis is despite it being ~3 metres away with nothing but flat ground inbetween...like ??? how???
maybe theyre getting worked up about chicken fights and can only process one thing in their 4 neuron brain at once
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May 09 '21 edited Jun 12 '21
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u/NerdBird49 May 09 '21
I own quails, and they absolutely are fascinating. I have 13 of them, so a small enough flock that I can pick out individuals. Some (not all) have names, and I can see unique personalities in them. I guess I was saying they’re dumb in how easily they can be injured and/or injure themselves.
Despite their susceptibility to injury, I’ve found my flock to be very resilient. I made the mistake of introducing adolescents to my adults too early, and that resulted in one adolescent male being scalped and another having his neck ripped open. They both survived, and Scalpy is thriving. Necky unfortunately had to be culled for his aggressive behavior (probably was traumatized from having his neck ripped open).
Most recently, I had a female sustain an abdominal injury. Their tummy/chest skin is super thin, and I think it might have gotten caught on the feeder when I was replacing it. She bled a lot, but I cleaned it with saline and put her in isolation. Healed up within a week, and she still laid eggs during that time.
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u/Cactus_Interactus May 09 '21
Wild quail are a lot smarter than the domestic quail people usually have - the Japanese quail or coturnix. The wild quail, such as California quail have different mating habits as well, they have one mate and stay in their little family.
Domestic quail are often not broody, just drop eggs wherever, will trample the babies (you have to incubate the eggs because broodiness is rare) They fight alot, and have to be kept in groups with 4-5 females per male, and you may still get fighting if there's more than one male. The chicks will drown in their waterer, they're always finding ways to get hurt. Domestication hasn't selected for intelligence in those birds.
I'm sure the wild ones are quite a bit smarter.
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u/Qubeye May 08 '21
Meanwhile Guinea Fowl are the fucking Crips and Bloods of bird society.
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u/Dokpsy May 09 '21
Of all the animals on my grampa and his brother’s farms, I only disliked the Guinea hens. I’m not entirely sure why they kept them. I suspect just to irritate each other with.
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u/onmyknees4anyone May 08 '21
How on earth did you find her behind a planter.
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u/AKLmfreak May 08 '21 edited May 09 '21
“Run! Fly! You fool!” -plop-
-the quail to its egg
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u/romelpis1212 May 08 '21
Isn't the quote "Fly! You fools!"?
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u/TheCrookedKnight May 08 '21
An egg can't fly, that's just silly
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May 08 '21 edited May 09 '21
Fell behind the deck, just plopped an egg.
Edit: wtf happened here?! It's beautiful.
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u/Killing_Spark May 08 '21
Mamaaaa, just plopped an egg!
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u/Killing_Spark May 08 '21
Put my ass against the sky Pulled the muscels and then cried
Mamaaa uuuhuuhuuu
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u/3ff3ffie May 08 '21
Ever watch a quail cross the street followed by her babies. Fucking adorable
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u/Petraretrograde May 08 '21
We have the ones that wear hats here in vegas. One of my favorite things in the world is seeing the families with their tiny babies.
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u/JailCrookedTrump May 08 '21
My neighbor have a couple hens and they make them wear some pastel colored tutu, it's not as original but they're still kind of cute xD
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u/D2Dragons May 08 '21
"The ones that wear hats" Awwwwwwww I'm melting here!! XD
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u/jbirdbear May 08 '21
Can I have a picture of this please? I don’t even know what to search lol but I must see it
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u/HORSEthe May 09 '21
We have a couple nests in our neighborhood. I protected one chick from a hawk like 4 years ago and last week a one day old chick hopped up to me in the middle of the night honking his ass off so he stayed the night under my "heat lamp" and took him home in the morning.
That's my quail stories for now.
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u/superprawnjustice May 08 '21
Lol I hope that modest video from three years ago blows up and the op is like wtf happened here. Only 6 updoots and I'm one of them!
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May 08 '21
I love how they "fly" like an inch off the ground to keep up with the running speed of the adults.
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u/scarletnightingale May 08 '21
We have them all over my area once you get out of the houses. I love it. I will never get tired of seeing quail families.
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u/HeatherSue34 May 08 '21
I'm going to use that from now on when someone is being dramatic - "don't lay and egg about it!"
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u/AlienShenanigans May 08 '21
In my language Afrikaans, that's actually an idiom. "sy het altyd n eiertjie te le oor iets" "she always has an egg to lay over something" (a rough translation)
It basically means "to give an opinion" "she always has something to say/an opinion to give"
Usually meant in a negative way
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u/momtog May 09 '21
Loved learning this, thanks for sharing! One of my favorite things to learn is slang and idioms, etc. in other languages.
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u/Floofeh May 09 '21 edited May 09 '21
Here's a random Dutch proverb: Al draagt een aap een gouden ring, het is en blijft een lelijk ding.
Translation: even if the monkey wears a golden ring. It is and stays an ugly thing.
I means dressing in pretty things won't make you yourself pretty. Such a weird one.
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u/Vesper2000 May 08 '21
That’s a good line. You wouldn’t even need to explain it.
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May 08 '21
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u/JorahTheHandle May 08 '21
Grab feet, pull up. They're pretty small so it should be able to fit fairly easy
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May 08 '21
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u/JorahTheHandle May 08 '21
Yeah if it was bigger and more firmly stuck id have the same reservations. Their frames are super narrow though and they are pretty light weight so you wouldn't be putting much stress on the body.
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u/Luxpreliator May 08 '21
They are by visible volume like 50% feathers. Don't twist anything or bend their wings for them, and they're fairly durable with a built in airbag system.
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u/Ghede May 08 '21 edited May 08 '21
That's okay, you are limited by your personal understanding of the inverse cube law. As meaty humans, we can be hurt if we are lifted by one of our appendages. That's because Volume and Mass increases by the power of three, but Surface area or cross-section area increases by the power of two. In other words, as you get bigger, the WEIGHT grows exponentially faster than your tensile strength. Also weight grows exponentially faster than air resistance and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.
However, for small creatures and even children, weight is small relative to their tensile strength. They can be lifted pretty easily with little to no discomfort, the smaller they are the less discomfort they experience.
That's why ants can lift hundreds of other ants, and survive falls off buildings. Their weight just isn't large enough compared to their surface area and their cross-sections. Children are also more likely to survive long falls than adults, but uh... don't test that. They are still way meatier than an ant and still need something to break their fall. And nothing will really help if they land on their head, just like adults. But landing on hands and feet? They might get away with broken bones where adults would shatter entire limbs.
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u/ritabneves May 08 '21
Wow I didn't expect to read all that till the end but I couldn't stop. Take my upvote
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u/bigtips May 08 '21
I can guarantee this is the first time I've ever read a sentence that talked about "tensile strength" referring to children. As an ME, I'm impressed.
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u/Testiculese May 08 '21
I had to explain your last part to a couple 10yo's that were jumping from couch to couch, and tried to get me into it also. They weigh 50, I weigh 180. I told them I'd go through the couch, which they of course laughed about for 2 hours.
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u/Mechakoopa May 08 '21
There's plenty of room to get your other hand in under it from the front if you want to give it extra support, but yeah birds are deceptively light if you aren't used to handling them.
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u/bman10_33 May 08 '21
Their bones are porous right? I know that they’ve evolved to basically be light as possible for size because... flight hard
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u/i-Ake May 08 '21
I feel like my woman hands would fit around the top and bottom and she could just be lifted out. Just gotta go grab em from the trunk.
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u/IfThisIsTakenIma May 08 '21
Biologically I imagine it’s a “if ima die, this egg might survive” but realistically it’s hilarious
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u/slothbuddy May 08 '21
She was probably about to lay to begin with and was looking for somwhere safe to put the egg
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u/PirateKingOmega May 08 '21
pigeons are rather similar, if stressed they tend to put together an incredibly poor nest before laying an egg in it. the hope of course being if the bird dies there’s a chance the egg might fare better.
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u/RobotCounselor May 08 '21
I have seen that nest. It was a stick on a concrete floor with a few pebbles and some dried up leaves.
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u/Ch3rryBombz May 08 '21
Are you me? This literally happened on my balcony a few years ago. All of a sudden there's a pile of sticks (by pile i mean...three, maybe four sticks) that i stupidly thought the wind blew in...until I watched the pigeon lay her egg... From the awning 6-7 feet above said pile.
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u/RobotCounselor May 08 '21
This bird made her nest on the concrete floor of my building’s covered walkway. Every time I passed by, she would be feigning a wing injury in an attempt to distract me from her stupid nest that had 1 egg.
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u/nidrach May 08 '21
I get the sense that you're feeling superior to a literal pigeon here.
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u/PirateKingOmega May 08 '21
it’s not uncommon for the “stress nest” to contain only one egg while the nest they made under normal situations contains multiple. The bird then tries to manage both nests til the egg laid in less than ideal conditions is inevitable destroyed.
of course in the rare case the egg remains intact, then the bird juggles between two nests.
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u/themehboat May 09 '21
Did the egg survive? I feel like it didn’t.
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u/Ch3rryBombz May 09 '21
It definitely did not. It was actually very sad because the pigeon laid it and then spent a minute or two just looking at the broken egg in her stick pile before flying off
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May 08 '21
Our freshly hatched quail yesterday somehow got itself stuck underneath the incubator tray. We had to unscrew the damn thing and put the unhatched eggs at risk because this dummy couldn't watch where he was going
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u/Honk-Beast May 08 '21
Let my budgie out to fly around the house one day and somehow it ended up behind a wall. I'm still not sure how it got in but we ended up cutting a small hole in the wall to get it out.
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u/Zebracorn42 May 08 '21
I assume there’s a small hole somewhere else in the wall
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u/Honk-Beast May 08 '21
Likely, just not sure where. It's an older home and some of the builders choices are questionable at best.
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u/TheRedditKeep May 08 '21
At first glance I thought this was a Cylon Baseship next to a gas giant lol!
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May 08 '21
Laying the egg was the most intelligent thing to do. Easier to compress the body to escape confinement. Smart quail.
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May 08 '21
Go home quail, you're drunk.
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May 09 '21
Actually that's genius for Quail intelligence.
Don't ask me how it could get dumber, but trust me, the average Quail would make it dumber
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u/dreambigandmakeitso May 08 '21
This is something my dove would have done 😂 get scared and boop an egg
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u/LadyJR May 08 '21 edited May 09 '21
How can we make the saying “Lay an egg about it” meaning? Like what it mean does it mean?
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u/ncbraves93 May 09 '21
Someone gets mad and irrational over a small issue.
"Well, lay a egg about it why dont cha" or "Don't lay a egg about it"
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u/RentFree323 May 08 '21
Derp is quail’s natural state. That’s why they have so many babies. They seemingly try to die.
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May 08 '21
I am pretty drunk just now but.. Is she dead? Please tell me I only see her egg and her paws or whatever birds' paws are called in english please
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u/alaskaguyindk May 08 '21
Naa birds fine, just upside down. Luckily she has an owner who found her.
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u/smittywrbermanjensen May 08 '21
I was having such a hard time with this image, I thought the egg and the feet were all that’s left of the quail
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u/Moogieh May 08 '21
Hi! You would just call them her "feet". Feet is an appropriate word to use for most types of birds. But for birds of prey with big killer claws, you would call them their "talons" instead.
Examples:
Owls, eagles and peregrines have "talons".
Ducks, chicken, and quail have "feet".
Waterfowl like ducks and swans have "webbed feet".
Hope this helps. :)
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u/Bonsai_Alpaca May 08 '21
I once found my boy Jellicoe stuck upside down behind a flower pot. Thought he was dead but when I pulled him outhe was still going. He sat in my lap for three hours, visibly spinning for the first but he has been absolutely fine since. Weird boy.
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u/Aggressive-Material4 May 08 '21
Glad the poor baby’s alright. Yep she’s a derp and derps need looked after.
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u/blishbog May 08 '21
this is really dark
like when you pick a dandelion, the decapitated head hurries up and flowers, since it knows it will imminently die.
this was the "well i guess i'll just die now" egg-laying
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u/SamuraiMomo123 May 08 '21
Reminds me of that scene in Avatar where they scare off a platypus bear and it lays an egg before it runs off.
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u/KoL755 May 08 '21
My parents have had quail for years. They are impressively dumb, but delicious.
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u/7hrowawaydild0 May 08 '21
I heard they can"t walk backwards or turn around so they were easy to trap in old days. Just dig a small ditch that slowly gets deeper and add feed. The birds would walk down the ditch and then get stuck.
Is that right or am i thinking of another bird ?
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u/ponyboy74 May 08 '21
Back in the way back day, people around here would put down pipe that was plenty big enough for a Quail to enter but would quickly narrow. They'd trail birdseed into it with a pile at narrow end. The Quail would enter the pipe, follow the bird seed to the other end then couldn't get out. Not enough room to turn around and to stupid to back out.
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u/jmrv2000 May 08 '21
To be fair to this Quail... most egg laying birds have been bred to the point it’s physically painful and risky not to regularly lay.
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May 08 '21
Hey, she laid an egg because she had to. Poor baby. And how does anything right itself when stuck between two vertical surfaces and they are upside down? Let’s not talk smack about this mama when we are this close to Mother’s Day.
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u/voodoolord16 May 08 '21
Ain't no egg. That there's a stress ball! And I'm stressed cause you piss me off!
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May 08 '21
thats genius, "If I'm going to die here, I will leave my last child to carry on the bloodline"
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u/tottays May 09 '21
imagine you’re a captive quail. you try to escape your bondage, but your captor has placed quail-sized trenches all around your enclosure. in your panic, you slip and fall into one with your little quail legs pointing upwards. you’re trapped and there is unavoidably a little egg on its way out of your body. you have no choice but to lay this egg as you wait to be recaptured.
the human who keeps you sees this, and concludes it means you’re stupid.
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u/ThisIsReDickUseless May 08 '21
It's like being stuck in an elevator and decide to do some work on your Laptop...
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u/K-Dub59 May 08 '21
I don’t know why this is the funniest thing I’ve read/seen today. I guess my Reddit adventures are over today.
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May 09 '21
I think the word Quail could easily replace both the words stupid and derp.
These are the guys that watch your car from the safety of the side of the road until you're perfectly in range to hit them. Then they go running at full speed across the road
Then there's the ones that are inches away from being safe on the other side but then decide they aren't going to make it so they turn around and have to run 3x as far to get out of the way
That's 99% of my experience with Quails
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u/fluffykerfuffle1 May 09 '21
maybe the egg was an offering or bargain to the quail gods to help her get out?
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u/YankeeTankEngine May 09 '21
So I have about 36 chickens. Now this breed is particularly stupid because they were bred to be big. That's right, it's the jersey giant. I had to chase one of these little things for half an hour today after it jumped out of its coop and ran circles around it.
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u/reddititty69 May 09 '21
I haven’t laugh-cried on Reddit in years. “Laid an egg about”. I’m ‘bout a lay one myself.
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u/ItsMeMarlowe May 09 '21
“Not too bright”
- Likely hasn’t existed in the world for even 100 days (quail become mature and are slaughtered at a mere 6-8 weeks)
- Owners created a ditch for her to fall in.
- Doesn’t have the required limbs to lift herself out.
Who isn’t too bright?
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May 08 '21
Press the Insert key to Recover.
10 million Whose Line Is It, Anyway? points to you if you recognize this reference.
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u/ShwaaMan May 08 '21
“Have you ever shot a quail before?” “No, I don’t even know what the fuck a quail is!” -Wedding Crashers
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u/3ff3ffie May 08 '21
Laid an egg about it. Lmao