If you do not have a Longneck Rifle, then use the Ascendant Bow from the “Hunt: Dilophosaurus” quest and pair it with tranq arrows, provided you haven’t thrown it away or lost it. Lemme give you a rundown:

You see, tranq arrows work in a similar way to the bite of a Titanoboa’s bite; that is, in both examples, torpor is distributed based on the amount of damage that is dealt.

Using my own Quetzal as a test subject, due to a bug in which I can deal damage to him when unclaimed, I tested the precise torpor distribution between a regular bow and my Ascendant Bow. Testing the Ascendant for a general range of damage, in the inventory it claims to be capable of dealing 244 damage on a single hit.

Testing with a regular bow can yield slightly above this however. Sometimes even enough to one-hit a low-level Titanoboa, which has saved my life numerous times in the South Cave. I then test for torpor distribution on a regular bow, with a body shot. The torpor rounded off at about 92 before sinking back down.

Considering a Quetzals typical torpor tolerance supply, not to mention how quickly it drains torpor, your gonna need a ton of arrows and maybe a few spare bows to knock that one out, especially at high levels, and in general just won’t be a fun experience unless you have the patience of a saint and go undisturbed by some carnivore.

So, after the torpor returned to 0, testing the Ascendant bow with tranq arrows, (with a Headshot, just to be generous) yielded roughly 1448 torpor, and with a somewhat blunted amount of damage too, a round of headshots with an Ascendant Bow an easy way to knock out a Quetzal without running the risk of killing it due to the inherently high damage that Ascendant Bows are capable of outputting.

However, in all likelihood, the majority of the hits the Quetzal recieves are going to be bodyshots and wingshots. So, to get a sample of the amount of torpor a Quetzal will generally recieve from an Ascendant bow, we need to direct our hits at the body. This results in approximately 169 torpor.

However, this sample was taken from the side, and most bodyshots are generally going to hit the Quetzals back. So I climb onto my Quetzal to perform a test of the amount of torpor you can generally expect to see from a hit recieved by the Quetzals back, with a test on the center of the back distributing 191 torpor, while a shot to the neck-and-shoulder area interestingly resulted in a total of 456 torpor.

These samples, in general, prove one thing here; Ascendant Bows are usually pure rivals to the Longneck Rifle when it comes to torpor distribution, and with Quetzals you should generally direct your shots at the area where the neck and shoulders meet, and, as typical with most other creatures, the head.

Land a few lucky shots with an Ascendant bow thats been loaded with some Tranq arrows, and a Quetzal soon-to-be yours wont be flying for long!

Just make sure you do it on a Tapejara set to follow, so that you can make the “target” whistle to have your Tapejara follow the Quetzal, and then the “passive” whistle to tell it to stop when you get too close. (If the Quetzal is really far away or is scared and fleeing because you shot it, the Spyglass can really help with the “target” whistle here)

Hopefully this helps those of you who want to tame a Quetzal but have no access to a Longneck Rifle of any sort on your journeys.