What it means
Ask a Scottsdale resident to name a desert bird and you will get one of two answers. Gambel’s quail are the plump, gray ground birds with a black plume curling forward from the forehead like a question mark. They travel in groups, run rather than fly, call constantly, and every spring parade lines of walnut-sized chicks across driveways, golf cart paths and patios. The cactus wren is the speckled brown bird the size of a robin, with a white eyebrow and a cocked tail, shouting from the top of a cholla or saguaro in a voice far bigger than it is.
Locals talk about them like neighbors. “The quail are back” is a spring announcement; “the wren built in the cholla again” is a complaint and a boast at once. The desert wildlife field guide lists both among the desert’s rewards, and they are the birds most likely to greet you on your first morning.
Where you’ll meet it
Everywhere with native shrubs: front yards, resort grounds, the Greenbelt edges, and every trail in the Preserve. Quail chicks appear from spring into summer; wrens sing year round and are easiest to see in the early morning from the tops of cholla, saguaros and fence posts.
Where the word came from
Gambel’s quail honors William Gambel (1821 to 1849), an American naturalist who died young on an ill-fated winter crossing of the Sierra Nevada. The scientific name, Callipepla gambelii, keeps him in it. Locals mostly just say “quail,” since this is the only one most of them ever see; in Arizona the bird’s range lines up closely with that of the honey mesquite whose seeds feed it.
The cactus wren is named for where it lives. Its scientific name, Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus, means roughly “curved bill, brown cap,” which is also a fair field description. It became Arizona’s state bird on March 16, 1931, in the same legislative season that made the saguaro blossom the state flower; the statute, ARS 41-854, names “Coues’ cactus wren,” a subspecies. Its call is the famous part: a harsh, rattling chug-chug-chug that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology compares to a car that just won’t start.
What it is not
The quail is not a California quail, which looks similar but has a scaled belly and lives mainly to the west, in California. The wren is not a thrasher; the curve-billed thrasher, also common here, is grayer, longer-billed and whistles “whit-wheet” instead of chugging.
The fine print
Gambel’s quail nest on the ground in a shallow scrape lined with grass, usually under a shrub. Clutches average 10 to 12 eggs, and the chicks are precocial: they walk out of the nest with their parents within a day of hatching and can fly short distances at ten days, though the parents guard and feed them for weeks. A good year can bring a second brood. From late summer to early spring they gather in coveys of 20 or more that roost together in shrubs at night, and their diet is mostly plants: seeds, leaves, buds and berries, with insects mainly for the young. Audubon notes they have adapted readily to suburbs, which is why they nest in Scottsdale planters.
The cactus wren is built for the desert. At 18 to 19 centimeters and 33 to 47 grams it is the largest wren in the United States, and it can survive almost without free water, getting it from insects, spiders, fruit and cactus. Pairs bond for life and defend territories year round. They build football-shaped nests of grass with a tube entrance, usually in cholla, and keep building: extra nests serve as winter roosts, males build dummies, and a pair may attempt up to six broods in a season, though rarely more than three succeed. City wrens have learned to pick insects off car radiator grilles.
The McDowell Sonoran Conservancy’s bird survey, run from January 2012 to September 2013, documented 128 species in the Preserve and confirmed breeding for 24. Both of these were on the list, which surprised nobody.