CALIFORNIA QUAIL!

 ‘California Quail’ on a fence.  CC attribute share alike 3.0.                 

Can’t you just visualize God using a paint brush to paint the feathers on this beautiful bird?  It is the California Quail, the state bird of CA.  (See photo above).  You can see the strokes of the brush on its sides and neck!  Then, just to add an exclamation point to His creation, He put a topknot of six feathers on the quail’s head! The California Quail is not only beautiful, but very interesting!

It makes its nest on the ground under a canopy of vegetation.  Here the female lays up to 12 eggs!  However, the next day you notice, maybe 28 eggs!  That is because some of the other females practice what is called, ‘egg dumping’.  They lay their eggs in someone else’s nest! It’s a good thing that all the parents get involved in caring for the young.  How would you like to try to care for 28 babies!  These birds can go without water when necessary, because they get most of their water from the insects and succulents they eat.

They all love to take communal dust baths!  It must get pretty wild like a dust storm when the entire flock, called a ‘cloven’ of 20 to 100+ birds decide to take this communal bath. 

But the most interesting thing about this bird is how the baby chicks prepare their bodies to be able to digest the local vegetation.  It requires protozoans, single-celled microscopic animals found in the intestines of the adult birds!  Get this!  

They peck at the adult’s feces!  Gross, yes, but this pecking transfers the necessary protozoans from the adults into their bodies and they are good to go!

I had no idea that this is exactly what doctors do to treat certain diseases in humans!  They began using this treatment in the 80’s.  It is called, fecal microbiota transplantation FMT, a medical procedure to transplant feces from one person’s healthy colon into a diseased colon to alter the microbiome of the recipient!  The microbiome is a vast army of microbes in our bodies we depend on to stay alive!  It protects us against germs, breaks down food to release energy, and produces vitamins.  According to PubMed Central, your intestines contain, ‘roughly 100 trillion microbes representing as many as 5000 different species!’

Fecal microbiota transplant is performed most commonly via colonoscopy, but the transplant also can be delivered via an enema or into the stomach or small bowel via a tube.

The trouble is, there is still uncertainty regarding the safety of this procedure.  There is always the potential for the transmission of infectious agents during the procedure. 

But isn’t it interesting that doctors are only recently aware of the value of this procedure! They should have read ‘The Book of Nature’! They could have, ‘asked the animals, they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, they will tell you!’  Job 12:7. Sure enough, the California Quail has been telling us for thousands of years that fecal transplantation is a good thing, saying:

IT WORKS FOR ME!!!