doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com New York Times Article on Quail Restoration

Hard to say whether the proposal could ever work, but interesting perspective on the value of linked habitat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/sports...;pagewanted=all

I suspect similar remedies might help pheasants, though I doubt they'll ever happen.

I wish we could get a good quail population back in Georgia! Bobby

Preserving or restoring large scale habitat connectivity is a central issue for the conservation of many species. Large scale agriculture,suburban sprawl, wetland drainage, highways, development generally, are wiping out habitat and wildlife across North America. Bottom line - just too damn many people. Soon we will be like the UK and Western Europe - very tame, very dull.

Nuthin' to it; just run by the bird man's place early in the morning before you go 'hunting' and buy however big a quail population you want for the day. Put the birds out in whatever kind of cover you like best or have available and go to it.

Like the newspaper article says, the problem is fragmentation of habitat. At the beginning of the last century the State of Georgia was an ocean of perfect quail habitat from the northern mountain valleys to the checkerboard family farms which replaced the ante bellum cotton plantations of the piedmont, to the longleaf pine/wiregrass flatwoods of the coastal plain.

Today, the farmers must utilize all available land to survive, timber growers depend upon a monoculture of planted pine plantations, and urban sprawl due to population growth continues to devour habitat. None of that is going to change.

There are still huntable wild bobwhite about, but its a young man's game. I always wondered what my Grandfather meant when he said "legs kill birds"; now I know...Geo

Kind of like what happened to the pheasants in PA about 30 years ago.

The small, 60-100 acre farms, many of them owned by guys who'd come back from WWII and used their GI Bill to buy a farm, got sold off when those vets started aging out of farming and their kids either didn't want to farm or couldn't afford to buy them. The ones that didn't get turned into houses, were amalgamated into larger farms or were farmed by tenant farmers. The tenant farmers could only make a go of it by using bigger equipment, which was only productive on larger fields. So, the fence rows - walnut, oak, and similar hardwoods, raspberries, brambles, etc. - got ripped out. The method of farming cornfields changed, too, with stalks being ground and composted after harvesting rather than left standing, eliminating both winter cover and the occasional leftover cob of corn. The fields that were in alfalfa - a big crop in E. Pa. and one where hens would nest and later shelter, feed and fledge their chicks - started getting three cuttings a year instead of two because the farmer needed to make the money from that extra cutting. Moving the first cutting up a week or two wound up taking the tops off of nests because the chicks would still be in the egg. Then, in 1982-1983, there was an avian flu that went through commercial mass henhouses and the wild birds.

The end result was that in the space of 5 years it went from a situation where one could count on kicking out a couple of roosters in every small 5-10 acre field, to one where seeing a rooster was worth writing home about. And it's stayed that way.

The habitat fragmentation from sprawl was the final curtain. Now the only phez you see are plants.

I can't see quail faring any better. In today's America money is the only thing anyone cares about and there's no money in habitat, let alone quail.