King Quail

The king quail (Synoicus chinensis), also known as the blue-breasted quail, Asian blue quail, Chinese painted quail, or Chung-Chi, is a species of Old World quail in the family Phasianidae. This species is the smallest "true quail", ranging in the wild from Southern China, South and south-eastern Asia to Oceania, up to South-eastern Australia with 9 different sub-species. A failed attempt was made to introduce this species to New Zealand by the Otago Acclimatisation Society in the late 1890s. It is quite common in aviculture worldwide, where it is sometimes misleadingly known as the "button quail", which is the name of an only very distantly related family of birds, the buttonquails. The male king quail comes in many colors, including blue, brown, silver, maroon, dark brown and almost black. They have orange feet which are hard and able to withstand a continuous life on the ground like many other game birds. The female is similar to the male but cannot come in shades of blue. They can live up to 13 years in captivity but only 3–6 on average. In the wild they may live only 1.5 years. The eggs of king quail are a light, creamy-brown colour and slightly pointed at the "top"; roughly ovular in shape.