Gamebirds | Galliformes

Hoenderachtigen | Gallináceas

Landfowl are heavily built ground birds with short, rounded wings suited only to brief, explosive bursts of flight, and strong legs and feet for walking, scratching and scraping at the ground. The short, sturdy bill is built for picking up seeds, buds and insects, and many species have a crop and a muscular gizzard to process tough food. The nest is a simple scrape in the ground holding a large clutch; the downy chicks are precocial, feeding themselves from the start and able to fly within days or weeks. In many species the male is strikingly different in colour from the female, carrying ornamental plumes or bright bare skin that is displayed in courtship.

Families in this order

Guans, curassows and chachalacas | Cracidae1 speciesThese are tree-dwelling gamebirds of dense, humid thicket and riverside woodland, spending most of the day high in the branches and moving about there by walking and clambering rather than scratching over the ground. Food consists largely of leaves, buds, flowers and fruit, plucked from the twig and swallowed whole; large seeds pass through undamaged, so the birds help sow the woodland they live in. In the half-light of early morning one bird starts a harsh, three-part shout, the whole group takes it up, and the racket rolls on for minutes and carries for kilometres across the scrub; in part of the family the windpipe is lengthened and lies in a loop under the skin of the breast, which gives the call its carrying power. The nest is a thin, see-through platform of twigs on a horizontal branch, with two or three rough white eggs. Within days the chicks have usable flight feathers and flutter after their parents up into the bushes, where they are fed bill to bill for weeks more.
New World quail | Odontophoridae6 speciesThe lower edge of the bill is finely serrated, which lets hard seeds and seed husks be cut through; in many species a forward-curving plume also bobs on the head in time with the bird's running. Escape is preferably on foot: only when almost trodden on do the birds burst up in every direction with a loud whirr of wings, after which a swelling assembly call whistles the group back together. In spring an unpaired male whistles the same clear two-part phrase from a fence post or low branch day after day. The nest is a grass-lined hollow beneath a tussock or shrub, usually with a roof of bent-over stems and an entrance at the side, so that it is invisible from above. In some species the male takes charge of a first clutch while the female starts a second. The chicks eat mainly insects for the first weeks. In dry country the birds are tied to drinking places, appearing there in the morning and towards evening.
Partridges, pheasants, grouse and allies | Phasianidae23 speciesIn some ground-nesting species within the family, males gather at a shared display ground where they inflate colour-changing air sacs on the neck, fan their tail feathers and stamp their feet to impress females; in other species a single male instead uses beard-like breast feathers and bare, colour-changing head skin for the same purpose. To digest hard food such as seeds and buds, the birds actively seek out and swallow small stones, which act as a kind of mill inside the muscular gizzard. Outside the breeding season many species live in coveys, tight-knit groups that roost together on the ground at night with heads facing outward so an approaching threat is noticed sooner. Most males take no part in incubation and leave after mating, leaving the female to manage entirely alone.