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Galliform populations in the Southern Great Plains are extremely susceptible to high heat, solar radiation, and drought at both population and individual levels. Nevertheless, our understanding of how thermally heterogeneous environments dictate the outcome of critical life history periods for ground-nesting birds is limited. This knowledge gap hinders our ability to understand thermal constraints on incubation as well as our capacity to predict the future impact of climate change on these species. Our objective was to investigate the way two sympatric species existing on opposite edges of their respective continental distribution behaviorally adjust to their surroundings and regulate incubation temperature. We assessed 22 scaled quail and 37 bobwhite nests and paired microsites at Beaver River Wildlife Management Area in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the 2015 nesting season. Incubation (Ti) and microsite (Tm) temperatures were recorded at 2 minute intervals for each nesting attempt. We observed that nest success was 62% for bobwhite and 29% for scaled quail respectively. Moreover, we found that maximum temperatures experienced at successful nests were up to 16�C (Ti=50.5�C) cooler than maximum microsite temperatures (Tm=66.8�C) whereas unsuccessful nests experienced greater thermal extremes (Ti=62.3�C, Tm=65.7�C). Additionally, incubation temperatures were on average > 5�C cooler than paired microsites indicating the fine scale variation in proximal thermal environments was substantial. Among species, we found that scaled quail Ti was up to 10�C hotter than bobwhite Ti throughout the season. Preliminary data indicates that quail are substantially moderating their thermal environment when constrained to thermal extremes. Research is ongoing and additional data will be used in projection models with climate change scenarios to help predict how critical life history periods will be affected in the future for these species.