Hunters and conservationists throughout the Great Lakes region areworking together to save a once common game bird. With changes infarming practices in the last couple of decades, habitat for thebobwhite quail has been disappearing, and without it the bird has beendisappearing as well. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Grahamreports… there’s concern the quail might not recover if things don’tchange soon:
Hunters and conservationists throughout the Great Lakes Region are
working together to save a once common game bird. With changes in farming
practices in the last couple of decades, habitat for the bob white quail has been disappearing, and without it the bird has been disappearing as well. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports, there’s concern
the quail might not recover if things don’t change soon.
(Sound of quail)
This is just the right place at the right time to hear the bobwhite quail.
It’s early morning. The dew is still on the field of freshly cut purple
clover hay. Nearby there’s a grove of trees bordering a small stream. Yet
despite near perfect conditions, it’s still a rare treat to hear this bird
here or anywhere else. That’s because its numbers are dwindling.
It’s tough to get a good count on the number of quail left, because the
population of this ground-nesting bird varies wildly from year to year.
That’s in part because the quail is highly susceptible to severe weather, so
its population can drop 50-percent in just one year. But even taking into
account that variability, conservation experts have studied decades of
records and they say it’s clear that the quail population has been cut at
least in half, and by some county by more than 80-percent.
“Uh, the sharpest decline was in the ’70’s. That was when we
really began to experience the fence row-to-fence row farming.”
That’s John Roseberry. He’s the senior scientist at the cooperative wildlife
research laboratory at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale.
Roseberry says farming practices changed in the 1970’s. To increase production,
farmers ripped out fence rows, hedgerows, and shrubs along ditches to
make room for more crop rows. At the same time many farmers stopped raising
livestock and no longer needed hayfields. That land was also planted in
row crops such as soybeans and corn. That eliminated much of the quail’s
habitat. From there John Roseberry says things got even worse.
“Not only was that decline the result of intensive farming
activities, but also the entire Midwest suffered some really severe winters
right at the end of that decade and really dropped quail numbers to their
It looked as though the population decline leveled off a bit from the
mid-1980’s to the mid-90’s, but Roseberry says it appears in the past couple
of years there’s been another steep drop in the population.
Quail hunters have been alarmed by the huge losses. Some quail hunters
organized a conservation group called Quail Unlimited. Rocky Evans is one
of the groups founders. He says quail unlimited gives away seed to grow food
for the birds. It also tries to persuade farmers and landowners to take
advantage of the federal government’s conservation reserve program.
That program pays them if they take certain land out of crop production and
let it grow naturally to help wildlife. But Evans says many landowners are
“One big problem that we’ve had and we’re going to have is a lot of
individual landowners distrust the federal government. I mean, that’s a
fact. But, the other fact is there’s more money on the table right now than
at any time in recent history that can reverse this trend.”
Evans says getting farmers and landowners to sign on is a challenge, or he prefers to call it an opportunity.
“Now, the opportunity for Quail Unlimited is to go door-to-door,
knock on doors, have public meetings, and educate them, absolutely, and to
tell them about the money that is there; there’s sign up– bonus sign up
money right now on the table and it’s there if they’ll use it.”
The conservation reserve program has helped a number of species re-
populate. But, for quail to benefit requires more than just setting aside the land. Quail Unlimited’s ag wildlife services director, David Howell, says because the landscape has changed so dramatically in the last 50 years. It’s not
enough just to let nature take its course. One reason is native grasses have
been displaced by thicker, coarser grasses such as fescue, something the
quail don’t like.
“Quail is a relatively small bird, six – eight inches high. And it
walks 99.9 percent of the time on the ground and it has to be able to move
through the ground, it has to be open enough. It can’t be sod-bound, thick,
dense. And once it begins to go that direction, which can happen in as
little as two years, then conditions just aren’t favorable for the bird.”
So, just like the days before settlers moved in, the areas need to be
burned every few years. And Quail Unlimited encourages landowners to plant
shrubs for cover and small seed crops to feed the birds. In other words manage
the land in conservation reserve as quail habitat.
And while that work is ongoing on the ground Quail Unlimited is also
working on the hill, Capitol Hill, lobbying congress to expand
conservation efforts in the upcoming 2002 farm bill. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Lester Graham.