Quail Groups Vow to Stop Quail Decline, Return to 1980 Levels
Reprinted from Livestock Weekly
Internet edition - July 23, 2009
By Colleen Schreiber
KINGSVILLE — Quail biologists, researchers, land managers and the like know and long ago perfected most of the tricks of the trade when it comes to managing and manipulating bobwhite habitat. Yet, despite their efforts, bobwhite numbers have been in a downward spiral for well over 50 years.
Data from the annual Christmas Bird Count indicates that 77 percent of the states in the bobwhite range have seen a decline in bobwhite numbers. Of greatest concern is the fact that the steepest declines have been in the South and Southeast, what many refer to as the “ Mecca ” of quail habitat. Texas bobwhite numbers have declined at a rate of about 5.6 percent per year since 1980.
Dr. Lenny Brennan, now a quail biologist with the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, authored a Wildlife Society Bulletin article titled “How Can We Reverse the Northern Bobwhite Population Decline?”, published in 1991, in which he made a prediction that if this declining trend wasn’t soon reversed, bobwhite hunting opportunities across the majority of the quail’s geographic range would be lost by the year 2000. That prediction has largely come true.
Up to that point, there had been mostly a laissez-faire attitude about managing quail. Brennan called for a “broad-scale, well coordinated effort in education, management and research” by all interested in the plight of bobwhite quail.
Brennan’s doomsday prediction was a wake-up call for sure, but one that came too late for some areas of the Southeast. Some members of the southeastern quail community, however, heard the call and vowed to turn things around. Four years later the Southeastern Quail Study Group was formed. The group created several working groups to tackle specific quail-related issues or problems. They also hosted the first ever regional forum, and from that effort came the Northern Bobwhite Conservation Initiative in 2002.
NBCI is a habitat-based restoration initiative with a goal of restoring bobwhite densities to 1980 levels. The formation of NBCI has encouraged a growing number of states to implement their own quail initiative programs, all of which are, more or less, a step-down version of the national plan. The first two states to implement such a plan were North Carolina and Georgia . Today there are 18 states with their own statewide initiative. Texas is one of those states.
Don McKenzie heads up the NBCI effort. McKenzie calls the 1990s the “awakening period.” But says “the real turning point” came in 2002 with the publication of the NBCI plan because it had the whole quail community standing with other bird conservation groups such as the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, which includes ducks, songbirds, wading birds, shore birds, and also the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, the Long Leaf Alliance and Partners in Flight, to name a few.
Since then, NBCI has become more than just a piece of paper, more than just a strategic plan. It is a plan that has empowered the entire quail community, and not just in micro-regions, at the local or regional level. It truly has become a nationwide effort.
Perhaps more important, with NBCI came the realization that restoring quail populations on a landscape scale involves more than just “kicking the dirt” at the ground level. It involves “people, politics, and money,” McKenzie insists.
“The goal is to take the information we’ve learned about managing habitat and the biology of the bird itself and transfer that information up to a higher level to begin affecting how our society and our government think about bobwhite quail.”
In an effort to initiate more financial incentives for landowners interested in improving quail habitat, NBCI is now particularly focused on “influencing policy” at the national level. In recent farm bills, the NBCI and its conservation partners, McKenzie points out, have made incremental advances with respect to increased funding for wildlife conservation.
A direct result of NBCI’s efforts is the Bobwhite Buffers Conservation Reserve Program. The program pays landowners who volunteer to set aside a 30 to 120-foot buffer around the edge of their crop field and restore it to native vegetation for quail. The field border provides nesting cover for quail, which is typically a limiting factor on cropland. Payment (landowner incentives) varies county by county, but in general it is based on the cash rental price for cropland.
Today, five years in, more than 200,000 acres are enrolled in the bobwhite buffer program. While 200,000 acres might not sound like a lot, the beauty of the program, McKenzie says, is that those 200,000 acres actually make millions more usable for quail, acres that might not have been usable otherwise.
The success of the bobwhite buffer program led to the creation of the Longleaf Pine initiative, which pays landowners to set aside marginal cropland to plant longleaf pines with native grass understory. It is much more restrictive in its range — only nine states are eligible for this program, and today some 67,000 acres are enrolled.
In addition to these two programs, at least 20 states in the bobwhite range have some conservation incentive program in place for bobwhite habitat on private lands. Funding is also available through programs like EQIP and WHIP.
And while the NBCI’s initial effort has been deemed a success, the quail community understood that to push forward and grow the momentum, the strategic plan needed to be updated, revised and improved.
“We have to get our heads out of the weeds and feet out of the dirt and start thinking and acting strategically so that we can be effective on a large scale,” McKenzie says. “To do that we’ve got to get ourselves plugged in at all the levels of society and government. To influence politics you have to engage the people,” he reiterates.
According to the NBCI website, the goal of the revision process “is to create baseline information and processes which will enable the creation of planning tools that can evolve adaptively through time.” Tall Timbers Research Station, in Florida , is leading the effort, headed by Bill Palmer and Theron Terhune, but they are being assisted by members of the quail community from all across the nation.
That baseline information is being gleaned through biologist ranking information workshops. Agency biologists, land managers, landowners, research scientists and a whole host of NGOs come together to offer their “on the ground” expertise on what areas in a state have the greatest potential or the least potential for long-term bobwhite conservation.
Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute in conjunction with Audubon Texas hosted such a workshop in Texas in May.
“NBCI recognized early on that states need to be the core of the bobwhite initiative because they are the legal stewards for resident game birds,” McKenzie says.
At the start of the workshop the state is divided into ecoregions and participants gravitate to the eco-region in which they have the greatest expertise. Based on a set of given factors identified as essential for maintaining bobwhite populations, and with the help of various ArcGIS layers (different geographical data such as roads, soils, vegetation, etc.), workshop participants are asked to prioritize and rank the respective eco-regions county by county and even sub-county, in a 10 square mile grid pattern.
Once the areas are ranked, each is given a confidence rating based on participants’ knowledge of land use tradition as well as landscape features and whether or not quail populations might improve if various management techniques were employed. A high ranking means it would take the least investment to recover quail populations; medium would take more and low significantly more or perhaps there isn’t enough money to make it happen.
The high ranked areas ultimately represent those areas with the highest likelihood for response given appropriate restoration and management actions; as a result, individual states can develop focal areas to specifically target areas where restoration efforts will first be implemented based on state resources (national and state allocated conservation funds). Once the low hanging fruit has been used up, restoration efforts will move out from there.
At the conclusion of the NBCI revision process, 23 of these state workshops (including a total of 25 states) will have been conducted and well over 500 individuals will have had a voice in the effort. The original NBCI plan involved only 50 biologists.
The new plan, which is expected to be rolled out in December, will be a transparent, user-friendly web-based system. Over time additional features will be added to the web-based system so that other things like national long-term monitoring may be accomplished. The intent is to also use the system as a means for measuring success or failure of the efforts implemented in the focal areas. More important, the new system will serve as an information gathering system that will enable the quail community to more easily get hard data and support materials into the hands of policymakers.
It’s hoped that by concentrating money and energy on these focal areas, success will come easier and more quickly.
“Success breeds success,” McKenzie says. “In fact, it’s already happening.”
Missouri was the first state to set habitat restoration objectives on a county by county basis, and Scott County was the first to meet and exceed its habitat restoration objectives.
“They began documenting increases in quail populations rather quickly,” McKenzie says. “The Chamber of Commerce got in on the game and created all kinds of buzz, and that led to more hunters coming to the area.”
In Texas , white-tailed deer co-ops have long been used as a tool to collectively manage deer on smaller tracts of land. That same model is now being employed effectively for quail. Texas Audubon leads in that effort. Kyle Brazil is Audubon’s quail and grassland bird coordinator and heads up their Quail and Grassland Bird Initiative, whose focus is on the establishment of such co-ops. To date, Audubon has brought together more than 100 landowners and land managers committing more than 2.8 million acres of Texas grasslands to restoration and conservation. Their goals are directly in line with both the national and state quail restoration plans, to restore quail densities to 1980 levels.
In his 1991 Wildlife Society Bulletin article, Brennan offered several probable reasons for the quail decline, including “clean” farming and a lack of prescribed fire, both of which relate back to loss of habitat. But land fragmentation was also cited as a likely culprit.
In Texas , land fragmentation is happening at a frightening clip, particularly along and east of the I-35 corridor. That’s why cooperative type management is so important.
“We need large acres of intact habitat — 3000 to 5000 acres — to ensure a long-term quail population,” Brazil points out. “So, we have to learn to manage quail collectively on these small acres of land. The Wildlife Habitat Federation is one “exemplary model,” Brazil says, of a wildlife cooperative.
“They haven’t changed the world for bobwhites, but thanks to their efforts there has been a very big improvement, and it shows that you can stop the bleeding and begin moving in the right direction by increasing public awareness.”
The Wildlife Habitat Federation is the brainchild of Jim Willis, who bought a 225-acre ranch in Colorado County . Willis is a quail enthusiast, but he didn’t particularly care about hunting quail; he just wanted to know they were there on his property.
Willis consulted with Audubon Texas , CKWRI, TPWD and NRCS to develop a habitat management plan for his property. Exotic grasses such as Bahia grass and bermuda were a problem for the quail, so the invasive species were gradually removed through a herbicide treatment replicated several times, followed by a prescribed fire. The exotics were replaced with native warm season grasses such as little bluestem, big bluestem, Indiangrass, and switchgrass. A forb component was added as well.
The payoff came in the form of a quail per acre. Willis also discovered that by improving habitat for quail, he was also improving the habitat for many other grassland birds. In fact, 31 species of grassland birds are now found on the property.
Willis’ success spilled over. His neighbors took notice, and in short order there was a desire among several of them to replicate the success on a much larger scale.
“A lot of his neighbors had grown up in the day when they could sit on their front porch and still hear bobwhite whistling, and they wanted that again and Jim showed them by example how it could be done,” Brazil says.
From that came the Wildlife Habitat Federation, which today encompasses more than 30 properties and tens of thousands of acres, some of which are more intensively managed than others. The co-op is now working to provide a habitat corridor that will connect co-op managed lands with the Atwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge.
Tall Timber’s Bill Palmer reiterates the co-op message and the importance of banding together with other like-minded conservation groups.
“Developing partnerships is absolutely critical because the same thing that helps quail helps migratory songbirds like grasshopper sparrows and meadowlarks,” Palmer reiterates.
“We have a huge habitat problem out there,” he continues. “We’ve got to have the habitat first before anything can happen. It’s not that difficult to develop quail habitat. It’s still very doable on many areas. It’s basically a matter of soil disturbance, timber management, prescribed fire, and good grazing management.”
And at the ground level it is the habitat on which the NBCI plan is focused. Developing these focal areas with the idea of showing success on a small scale will, as McKenzie says, breed success on a larger scale. At least that’s the idea.
“So our first goal is to stop the decline, and then hopefully, over a period of time, we’ll begin to see increasing quail numbers across the landscape,” Palmer says. “It is mind-boggling sometimes to think about trying to turn it around, but it’s certainly doable; there’s nothing biologically that says it can’t happen.”
Palmer echoes Brennan’s and McKenzie’s message that the very survival of huntable quail populations is dependent upon NBCI and its partners’ success.
“If we don’t do this, I almost guarantee in a short amount of time there will only be a few areas in the country that will have quail left. In the end, society has to want it, and we have to make the case that they need it,” Palmer concluded.
