Don’t follow this link if you’re packing!

It’s just a photo set of pictures of quail, but I noticed that my right forefinger reflexively twitched at the photo of the Republican lawyer in the middle of them. There may be a neurological explanation for Cheney’s shotgun error, after all.


  1. Unstable Isotope says

    I can’t blame Cheney for wanting to shoot big Republican donors. I feel that way sometimes, too. [figuratively, of course, if anybody’s monitoring…]

  2. says

    Thanks for the link, PZ.

    I am glad to see that rows and rows of pictures of pretty birds lull people into dreamy complacency so the shock value of the jolt is even greater!

  3. says

    You can pick up, hold and pet a pen-reared bobwhite quail – they are poultry, after all. They live about two years, I believe (that is Japanese quail – not sure if bobwhites may live a little longer).

  4. says

    According to the links Coturnix had, bobwhite quail rarely live more than one year in the wild, though they can live up to five years in ideal conditions.

    Bobwhite quail – the holy grail of my stewardship plan in my ecotone in the Ozarks1

  5. Graculus says

    they are poultry, after all.

    They are the pomegranates of poultry. Tasty, but a lot of work. Mind you, I do my quail hunting in the frozen foods section.

  6. fusilier says

    You shouldna included former Senator and Vice President J. Danforth Quayle. You just pushed a button.

    1. Nobody ever mentions that the “potatoe” spelling was what the kids were supposed to learn. Quayle was working off a set of index cards given him by the teachers. I wonder why “Murphy Brown” scriptwriters left that out?

    2. As a US Senator from Indiana, Quayle was one of the few in Congress to regularly and consistantly support budgets for scientific research – specifically NIH, NSF, and NASA. I’ve heard him speak on those topics while I was doing research at the IU medical center campus in the late 70s/early 80s and he had his facts and figures down solid.

    3. No, he wasn’t a very glib off-the-cuff speaker. So What? Perhaps someone should re-read PZ’s objections to the “Dodoes” movie. (Either here, or on Panda’s Thumb, I can’t recall of the top of my head.)

    4. Now we have Sen. Evan Bayh – Mr. All-Things-To-All People, the embodiment of the curse, “be careful what you wish for….”

    James 2:24

  7. says

    Isn’t it scary that we are longing for the good old days when Dan Quaile was the Vice and the worst thing he did was misspell and look goofy? How much difference 14-15 years makes in our perception what is or is not an acceptable Vice President.

    And yes, quail are a lot of work but, do they ever taste delicious!