Home Forums Birds & Dogs Upland Game Some Bobwhite Quail

I don't hunt quail but its still nice to see them. In eastern NC today.

Indeed. Thanks. Got a buddy in Maiden. How far are you from there?

I actually live in southeast Virginia. I'm down in NC several times a month.

Great to see.

A rare sight indeed. Wonderful.

Extremely rare, as in non- existent, in my part of N.C. these days. 30 years ago, could find 6 to 8 coveys a day, haven't heard a Bob whistle in the spring in years. I miss them.

Miss hunting/seeing quail in Nebraska.

Looking forward to the season opening on Saturday.
I took my dogs out yesterday for a bit of training and found 5 coveys. I have not been out before then to get feel for how the summer hatch went, but yesterday was encouraging.

I live in the mountains of WNC. Been a long time since I have seen or heard a quail or a grouse. I wish the wildlife commission would put some energy towards them.

I am told that grouse are extremely difficult to impossible to successfully stock. Quail are perhaps more successfully stocked, but struggle with current predator populations. A common sense bounty on hawks would likely help a bit. Urbanites will never stand for that, though.

Relocating wild quail can have excellent results if the property they're going to has been properly managed for all of the needs that quail have, particularly nesting habitat, brood habitat, and escape cover, all on a large enough tract for the project to work. The few sources for such quail (primarily Tall Timbers) have extremely high standards to qualify for bird relocation.

Released birds are typically for a hunt done on the same day, if not an hour or two before the hunters arrive. These birds are all pen raised and have no survival or reproductive skills. They're typically bigger, and always slower than wild birds, making them exceedingly vulnerable to predation, which happens soon after the hunters leave. Hunting them is a lot of fun, however, and commercial quail hunting is now the primary way that most quail hunters still get to enjoy the sport. That said, it's a completely different challenge and experience than hunting the real thing.

Had about 20 walk out into a foodplot I planted a couple years back, cool thing about it my son, who 10ish at the time got to see them. Probably the only ones he will ever see in the wild down here and he'll probably never see them again.

I have a buddy he claims to have 20/20 vision sit in that same stand maybe a year before and after the hunt said "I've never seen that many chipmunks together in my life!" I still give him heck about that.

Here's a nice property managed for Bobwhites. A place to stay too.
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/l.../t-boone-pickens-mesa-vista-ranch-house/

I'm going down to NC on December 7 for one of those preserve Bobwhite hunts. A friend of mine is treating me. I've never done that before. He's done it a bunch and gets a lot of birds. It's a pay-per-bird hunt. Hope I have a little fun. But they are captive raised birds. I had to get a specific Preserve Hunting license. We're hunting or, more accurately, shooting-at chukars, too.

Growing up, I loved quail hunting more than anything.
Had permission to hunt a tree nursery within walking distance of home. And there were hedgerows to hunt on the walk there. Paradise lost.

Shot my last wild quail in the mid-90's, after nearly 30 years of it. The last season or two of my GSP's life, they were becoming scarce. Since then, I've seen nothing that would make me think another dog would be useful. They are still around, but so scattered that it would require almost unlimited access to land to make hunting them feasible. No other type of hunting has ever really taken its place in my heart.

The biggest problem in my part of NC are the clean farming practices. Right now, 95%of the crops are in and all of the fields are clean as a whistle to the tree line. If they could just leave one harrow width of grain around the fields, for food and cover...that would be a huge step forward. Very little prescribed burning takes place anymore. Lepedezza Bicolor and Partridge Pea used to be planted on back roads. A few simple steps would help. Currently, the few birds we are getting are Coyote bait.

The loss of quail is largely a habitat issue. There's nothing wrong with most any area of the bird's past home range that would prevent their propagation if the landowners were willing to forego maximizing economic incentives and direct the land management towards a new objective. Of course the heavily fragmented nature of land ownership is also an issue as you simply can't achieve the necessary goals of quail management on smaller tracts.
Pine timber, shopping centers, row crop farming, neighborhoods, and the Smokey Bear syndrome all are largely antithesis of the proven and widely known recipe for having and enjoying wild bobwhites. Quail are currently flourishing in areas that management for them, but for the overwhelming portion of their once large range, the choices and priorities that landowners and government agencies have made created the frustration and circumstances that many now experience.
All that said, other options are still out there that can create abundant bird numbers. We just need more people willing to sacrifice a few dollars, something that's more easily said than done, in order to achieve it.

Never in my life has there been any prescribed burning of any significance. It's beneficial without a doubt, but we used to have birds without it. Clean farming is definitely part of it, and I think the nesting phase in particular is where birds are not finding suitable habitat. Very few successful broods are being hatched.

We are very lucky to be covered up with wild Quail, here in S. Texas wild Quail are a whole different hunt than pen raised Quail. Rio7

No doubt prescribed fire isn’t an absolute requirement, but it is a natural part of the ecosystem that quail have clearly adapted to, and are largely dependent on. The lack of fire is the unnatural occurrence, not the periodic burning of the landscape.
And while quail can occasionally get along without fire, landscapes that don’t have it soon develop crown closure from the sweet gums and other hardwoods that will soon create a thick overstory that will be highly detrimental to anything that lives on the ground that needs nesting and predatory cover.
This is especially the case east of the Mississippi where heavy annual rainfalls are prevalent. Prevent the natural fires from occurring and you can pretty much forget about ground nesting birds. What you end up with is a typical federally managed woodland that only satisfies deer hunters.
While a few quail may make it in a Smokey Bear landscape, the numbers will at best be very limited as the research shows that quail like to nest in spots that were burned (or disturbed, which can included discing) 2 years before. “Early successional habitat” are the key words if you want to maximize quail, and the description of quail being a “fire bird” seems to be a pretty accurate one.

BTW, the quail pictured are wild quail, not pen raised. That photo was taken at Alligator River NWR. That NWR does seem to have a pretty decent pupulation, though you can't hunt them, there. Still nice to hear them, and especially see them.

In the road this morning.



Outside my back door, I throw a couple of cups of Chicken Scratch out for them in the mornings. Rio7

Good to see those.
Used to be everywhere I hunted at.
I heard one calling year before last, but
haven't seen any.
I try to get everybody I know to set
traps for all these varmints, but they
either don't want to put in the work, or
have some notion that they don't want to
kill something that's not consumed, etc.

Then in the next breath, they cuss about the
varmints eating all their corn and tearing up
their timers and wiring.
I prefer to have a large population of game birds
and small edible game and healthy fawns and
unmolested vegetable gardens and feeders etc.

Thanks for posting the photos

Yeah, I'm a forester, am well-versed in fire ecology, and have conducted a number of prescribed burns myself. What you are describing is a relatively unpopulated landscape when smoke management was not a concern. That was the natural ecosystem alright, but it has been gone for a long time and is not ever going to return. People, highways, and ambulance-chasing lawyers, not to mention limited suitable burning days and high costs, will prevent those conditions from ever occurring again. As for the bit about crown closure, certainly that's not ideal. But I had good, albeit tough, hunting 30-40 years ago in areas that had closed canopies; although admittedly those stands were not vast in size and usually adjoined ag land or more recently-disturbed woodland where nesting conditions were more suitable.

However, on the landscape level there are a heck of a lot more forest disturbances these days than there was back then due to shorter timber rotations and early thinning. But the disturbances are not now, were not 30-40 years ago, and won't in the future be coming from the use of fire. Quail are still around in very reduced numbers, and seem to have become more like turkeys in that they need more real estate in which to make a living. The woods are not the problem, IMO, unless you count the predators that inhabit them. Even if they were, if we are waiting for people to wake up and decide to start prescribe burning in order to produce a huntable population of quail, then we will die waiting.

The nesting habitat on the edges is what I think is lacking. The two year rough that you mention would be great if farmers would do it. A massive incentive program would have to be established in order to make a difference on the landscape level. Farmers are wired to cultivate every square foot they can get a disc, sprayer, bush hog, or combine over. I frequently see where they disc land so close to the edge of a ditch that the topsoil is perched over the edge, waiting to wash into the ditch at the next good rainfall.

Had a fun hunt yesterday with some college friends. It was the first time this area of the property had been hunted this year, so the dog handlers weren’t sure as to what we’d find. In the morning, on average, I’d say we found a covey about every 10 minutes, which is pretty awesome by every measure, though we weren’t able to shoot into each one.
Good times in the outdoors with friends is always hard to beat.

Spent my childhood training our English Setters with Bobwhites, fun times!

Very similar but not the same we have mearns in Az.

Like all other desert dwellers, they rely on our rainfall. This summer was pretty dry, I'm interested to see the numbers.

Hunted those in farm fields and fence rows as a kid around Culpeper Va. Never hear/see any now on return visits. Never did one, but I always heard the Piedmont plantation dog and carriage hunts were the epitome of hunting.