Why the buttonquail defies every expectation you have about bird family life

Nature · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Buttonquails are masters of subverting avian norms. Despite their name, they are not true quails, and their social structure flips traditional gender roles on their head. In this ground-dwelling family, the females are the colorful, dominant sex, leaving the males to handle the domestic duties of incubation and parenting.

Though they look remarkably like the true quails of the order Galliformes, buttonquails belong to the order Charadriiformes, placing them among the shorebirds. This taxonomic confusion persisted for decades, with scientists previously placing them in the crane or pheasant orders. Molecular and morphological data eventually corrected this, revealing that turnicids are an ancient lineage within the shorebird group, a fact supported by the discovery of the Early Oligocene fossil Turnipax.

The most striking feature of the buttonquail is its serial polyandry. In most species, the female is more brightly colored than the male and possesses a unique vocal organ—an enlarged trachea and an inflatable esophageal bulb—used to produce a booming call. After the pair builds a nest on the ground, the female lays a clutch of four or five eggs before departing to find another mate. The male is left behind to incubate the eggs, which hatch after 12 to 15 days, and to raise the precocial chicks until they achieve independence.

Physical differences also set them apart from the true quails they resemble. Buttonquails lack both a crop and a hind toe, and they are exclusively terrestrial, preferring to run rather than fly. The family consists of 18 species across two genera: the diverse Turnix and the singular Ortyxelos, which contains the quail-plover. These birds are found across the warm, tropical grasslands of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and New Guinea, though some populations, such as the Tawitawi common buttonquail, have been lost to extinction since the mid-20th century.

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