Arkansas Sportsman

Wolves, cats are poor prescription for quail problems

Mike Widner beat me to it in his Perspectives letter Monday, so I can only second his comments about how we would have more quail if we had more quail habitat.

Widner did not cite his qualifications as an authority, so we hope he doesn't mind if we do it for him. Widner was for many years the turkey biologist for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. He is also an avid bird hunter who owns a fine English setter. That setter gets a lot of work, both in and out of Arkansas.

Widner's letter rebutted another letter from a correspondent in El Dorado who discredited the link between low quail numbers and poor habitat. Widner's response was simple. He still finds huntable numbers of quail in Arkansas where suitable habitat exists.

The writer advanced several notions that merit a closer look.

For example, he wrote that the acreage around his residence in El Dorado is perfect for quail, and supported a large covey that diminished over the years until it vanished.

"The surrounding habitat," he wrote, "is identical to what it was in 1975."

Memories are malleable things that tend to mold around preconceived notions. I would bet a steak dinner that if the correspondent compared recent photographs of his place to photographs taken in the 1970s, he would notice that the habitat has changed significantly.

His property is only part of the puzzle. In the unlikely scenario that his property has remained in a static condition over the past four decades, it is even more unlikely that neighboring property has remained equally static. Landscapes constantly change. Only extensive manipulation, or management, keeps them in a condition that supports quail.

Quite likely, the correspondent's property was deep in the downward arc of decline by 1975. He mentioned only one rapidly diminishing covey. If the property was good quail habitat, it should have had more than one covey. Multiple coveys are essential to maintain overall populations, but also the health of individual birds.

Steve DeMaso, an authority in upland bird management, explained the diminishing returns of so-called "island coveys" when he was the quail biologist at the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation in the 1990s. I had the privilege of proofreading his articles and papers before he submitted them for peer review and publication. We walked many miles together over the Oklahoma prairie while hunting, and these hunts were also very educational. He was later the upland bird biologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Multiple coveys in close proximity are necessary because it is essential for birds to breed with birds from different coveys, DeMaso said. This maintains genetic diversity, which helps prevent disease. Inter-covey migration also bolsters and replenishes coveys and helps maintain overall quail populations.

If habitat degrades, covey numbers diminish.

Almost certainly, the correspondent's recollections from 1975 were of a remnant "island covey" that was well on its way to oblivion.

The correspondent blamed the statewide disappearance of quail on burgeoning numbers of small predators that thrive in the absence of apex predators like wolves and mountain lions. Raccoons, possums, foxes, skunks and rats are to blame, he wrote, because there are no big predators to control smaller predators.

If that is true, then what are the small predators eating? They obviously aren't eating quail, and they haven't for decades, because there aren't any quail to eat. Conversely, quail were plentiful from the 1930s to the 1960s. There weren't any wolves or mountain lions around in those days, either.

I enjoyed a long chat the other day with a gentleman who fondly remembered the many coveys that used to inhabit the rolling hills near his home in central Grant County. Along the fencerows are ribbons of brush that are so thin that they don't even obscure the barbed wire. The pastures are slick as billiard balls, with no clump grasses for quail to nest, and no overhead cover to protect quail chicks. Even in overgrown fields of fescue and other non-native grasses, quail chicks cannot live because they can't walk or run through thatch.

In the Delta, the fields are all in row crops that practically touch asphalt roadways. The Gulf Coastal Plain is largely choked with young pine thickets that contain no food, nor nesting or brood cover.

Where is a quail to live?

Only where they can, and that has nothing to do with wolves and lions.

Sports on 01/04/2015

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