Buttonquail
family of birds
Buttonquail or hemipodes are members of a small family of ground birds, Turnicidae, in the order Charadriiformes. Despite their name and resemblance, they bear no taxonomic relationship to Old World quail of the tribe Coturnicini under the order Galliformes, including the species often called "button quail".
There are 18 species in two genera, with most species placed in the genus Turnix and a single species in the genus Ortyxelos. They inhabit warm, tropical grasslands of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia and New Guinea.
Buttonquails are small running birds that avoid flying. Unusually among bird species, the female is the more richly colored of the sexes. While the quail-plover is thought to be monogamous, Turnix buttonquails are sequentially polyandrous; both sexes cooperate in building a nest in the earth, but normally only the male incubates the eggs and tends the young, while the female may go on to mate with other males.
Taxonomy
The genus Turnix was introduced in 1791 by French naturalist in Pierre Bonnaterre. The genus name is an abbreviation of the genus Coturnix. The type species was subsequently designated as the common buttonquail.
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This entry incorporates text from “Buttonquail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.