Range Quail

White on the chest tells you about tuxedo, not about the sex In wild-type Coturnix the breast is sexually dimorphic: cocks carry a plain reddish-brown breast and hens a paler breast with dark speckling, which is why so much beginner advice says to sex quail by looking at the chest. That method does not work on Range birds. Range is built on extended brown, and the varieties built on extended brown (Range, Tibetan, Rosetta and the tuxedo forms of them) are not feather-sexable, because the cock and hen breast patterns are no longer different from one another. There is published support for the same effect in a related mutation: the study that mapped the panda white-spotting locus records that, unlike wild type, the panda phenotype shows no sexual dimorphism at all.

So on the birds below, white versus brown on the chest is a statement about tuxedo and nothing else. We sex these birds by vent examination of the cloacal gland, not by looking at plumage, and we would tell any buyer to do the same. We had two birds recorded under the wrong sex this summer (Range 2 and Range 7) and both are corrected here.

A second honest caution, about color Heavy tuxedo marking removes so much colored feather that judging Fee by eye also stops being reliable. A bird can read as pale simply because most of its breast is white, which has nothing to do with red reduction. Where we are not sure, this site says so rather than picking the flattering answer.