28 gauge shooter, my land is on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I have a small farm out here but not much for hunting sad to say. I hope to move back East in a few years.

I know land use has changed so very much since I was a boy. Gone are the tomatoes, sugar corn or peas for canneries, gone are the small fields with hedge rows and corners with good weed cover, gone are the fallow fields, gone are the hedge rows around every field, gone are the days when a farmer would shoot a predator on sight, gone are the days of less use of pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. We farm in a mono or very near mono culture way, with one, two or perhaps three total crops on a large farm. Big fields, no cover left along ditches, few places for quail to nest and raise young.

But I tired to get around most of those things. I created cover, created hedge rows, natural feeding areas with adjacent nesting habitat, weeded areas, brought in birds from other areas, released birds from game bird breeders, terminated countless predators of all nature. And truth is that it could have been a parasite or virus introduced which the quail had no defense for instead of turkeys. If I ever get the answer(s) I'd spend another 100K and the rest of my life trying to give them, (quail), a comeback. Very few things give me as much joy as watching the sheer energy of a young pointer working a covey or single then locking up on point. That unsaid look she gives me after the flush, what did you do after I found them for you? Few men are worthy their dogs.