Guest writer

A rare bird, indeed

We can bring quail back to state

What has happened to our quail and how do we get them back?

If you asked that question to a wildlife biologist, you'd probably get a long-winded answer about loss of habitat, etc., but the loss of habitat would be wrong. The quail are gone because we killed them.

Yes, it's as simple as that. But stay with me. We didn't shoot them like we did the passenger pigeons. No, we didn't, but we killed them just the same.


In 1975 we moved into our house on Calion Road, just within the city limits of El Dorado. The acreage around our house--with some open fields, small pond, and hedgerows--is perfect for quail, and there was a large covey that I would kick up every time I walked around the pond, which was about 300 yards from our house.

As the years passed, I noticed the covey was gradually getting smaller, until about 10 years ago it got down to less than four birds, and now they are gone. The habitat is the same and the surrounding land for at least a half-mile is identical to what it was in 1975. And no they didn't just move to the next farm. I've talked to all our neighbors and none of them have heard a bob-white whistle in years.

What happened to all our quail?

To get the answer, we need to go back to a few decades after the Civil War when a full-scale attack on the large predators in our state intensified. Even as late as the 1920s, Arkansas and other surrounding states were offering bounties for the killing of bears, mountain lions, bobcats and wolves, and schoolboys were encouraged to shoot every hawk or owl they spotted. I think you know how that worked out.

Our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents killed every wolf and mountain lion in the state, 99 percent of the bear, most of the bobcats and untold millions of hawks and owls and, by doing that, they doomed our quail to near-extinction.

As the large predators in the state decreased, there was an animal vacuum, and into that vacuum came an explosion of possums, coons, armadillos, rats, skunks, foxes, and the very worst--feral hogs. No, these animals didn't eat the quail, but all of them have one thing in common: They scavenge for food on the ground, and they will eat virtually anything. That is what killed our quail.

These scavengers ate every nest of quail eggs they encountered, and since there are virtually no predators left in the state to hold their numbers down, these egg-eating varmints increased by the millions, and the quails' numbers dropped as they increased.

Yes, that is why we don't have the quail coveys of the past. We have disturbed the balance of nature, and we are paying for it by the loss of our quail.

There is only one way to restore the quail population in Arkansas. We must restock the large predators to the point where they control the animals that eat the quail eggs. Yes, we must restock the red wolves, the cougars, bears and bobcats. And we must stop trying to kill off the coyotes, bobcats, hawks and owls. Yes, we must restock even wolves and cougars right here in Arkansas.

Dangerous? No! Check on the wolf packs that have been restocked in the Rockies, and you won't find one case of an attack on humans by wolves. Here in Arkansas we have a buffet line of food for these predators. Just think of the thousands of feral hogs that roam our state. We can never control feral hogs that are destroying our quail without some help from Mother Nature in the form of natural predators.

But when we restock, we must stop trigger-happy deer hunters from shooting these predators, and that's a relatively simple matter: Just have the same fine that a hunter gets for shooting one of the north Arkansas elk out of season; $50,000. If we had that fine, I would bet the deer hunter who killed the mountain lion a few weeks ago would have hesitated before he pulled the trigger.

You can release the first red wolf pack in my backyard.

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Richard Mason is president of Gibraltar Energy Co., and a former president of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation. He lives in El Dorado.

Editorial on 12/20/2014

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