No bird soars too high,
if he soars with his own wings.
—William Blake
I live on the outskirts of Tallahassee, Florida, on a farm in Gadsden County, eleven miles west of Coon Bottom and thirteen miles south of Booger Bay, Georgia. The region is referred to as the red hills of Florida for its abundance of clay and the rolling nature of its topography. All in all, a fine place to live, particularly if one has the means to travel every so often to a place where people speak the King’s English and where chewing tobacco is thought of in the same vein as messing one’s pants. A small price to pay, I might add, for an otherwise wild and as yet untainted piece of geography.
Shade-tobacco farming in Gadsden County (specifically, cultivation of the broad outer leaf used to wrap Cuban cigars) had enriched the local economy since the turn of the century. Until 1960 or so, the sweet fragrance of tobacco was carried on every breeze, coins jingled in men’s pockets, and life in the county was sweet and full of promise. However, as with most undertakings that rely on the poverty of one class for the benefit of another, there are always tiers of hungrier people with lower expectations who will work for less. This is how Gadsden County lost its hold on the tobacco market to the field hands of Central America.
A handful of long, rectangular barns, fashioned out of the hearts of tall slash pines, once swollen with stringers of curing tobacco leaves and the smoke from carefully tended charcoal fires, stand as silent witnesses. Resin lingers in the darkness of the few remaining barns, but outside the wood shingles are weather-warped and the roofs dull. They endure, unused except as occasional hideouts for children and as shelters for the mice and swallows that come and go through the wind tears of summer storms.
The county’s sudden loss of wealth (Gadsden was, for a moment in history, the richest county in the state) left a huge workforce wanting and unemployed, an undertow of penurious souls that never recovered economically. Thirty years later, at the end of every month, mothers send their children to public school on empty stomachs. Food swells the grocery shelves, but in many households the money has run out. I live in the poorest county in Florida.
My land lies between the sandy coastal soil south of Tallahassee and the flat piney forests of Georgia. The barrel-like clay hills, hardwood bottoms, and deep chasms that cut into the earth exist, I am told, because this is where the southern grade of the Appalachian mountain range falls to the sea, a romantic theory that explains some of the tortured gullies in which my turkeys strut.
This earth is not as rich as the tenderloin of grade-one soil that runs north and south between Thomasville, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida, but then, neither am I, so my aim is to improve what I have as best I can within certain financial boundaries.
The farm was once part of a much larger plantation and, throughout its existence, has produced cotton and the slaves to pick it, cattle, shade tobacco, peanuts, corn, and a large, rambunctious Southern family. In 1990 I bought eight hundred acres of what remained of the homestead, changed its name and status to Dogwood Farm, and to the utter delight of my hunting dogs—Robin, the English springer spaniel who looks like a Stubbs painting; Mabel, the doltish lemon-and-white English pointer; and Carnac, the roan-colored French Brittany puppy who resembles a suckling pig—proceeded to grow birds: wild eastern bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus for those interested in the specifics of what things are and where they come from).
The woods, which comprise 50 percent of the property, are composed of second-growth loblollies, slash, a handful of long-leaf pine trees, thousands of white, red, and water oaks, gum trees, hickories, dogwoods, ironwoods, chinaberries, pecans, poplars, willows, sassafras, magnolias, and crab apples. A number of eighty-year-old live oaks round out the selection. Uniformity bores me senseless, and while some of the finest plantations north and east of me grow beautiful, manicured rows of plum-perfect pinewoods, no matter how straight and how old those trees may be (and I can attest that they are), a few hours under their homogeneous canopy make me long for the garish play of light that glances over the boughs of my hardwoods.
Our most eccentric tree, the live oak (Quercus virginiana), also named after the state of Virginia, spends its life draped in Spanish moss, a rootless epiphyte that the Southeast Indian women fashioned into skirts and which African slaves later used to stuff their mattresses. These are hugely reassuring trees, trees that define insouciance, poets among trees, and I feel a kinship to them, as I would feel a kinship to baobabs if I lived in Senegal. As luck would have it, bobwhite quail relish the bittersweet taste of acorns, and in plentiful years—about one out of every three—they march down to the bottoms, to where the hardwoods grow thick, where the deer and the turkey live, and where food falls from the sky.
The other half of the farm is given over to half a dozen fields and abandoned pastures. One such cornfield was so large—two hundred acres—that I didn’t know how to manage it until it was brought to my attention that quail, like most gallinaceous birds, are stalkers of edges. Because small openings yield more edges than larger ones, I broke this monotonous expanse into ten or twelve long, narrow fields with trees, food plots, and cover. The pastures yield Pensacola Bahia grass and to a lesser degree Bermuda grass, thick, mat types, savored by cows and by bobwhites during their nesting season, grasses that once established are difficult to get rid of. Two small wet-weather ponds stain both ends of the two-hundred-acre field, and a thirty-acre lake, teeming with brim and black bass, fills an old hardwood bottom. On the edge of this lake I built a cabin, officially a writing studio, but in reality the quarters I escape to as early as possible each day and inside of which I spy through high-powered binoculars on wood ducks and ospreys, martins, bluebirds, the quail and doves that visit my feeder, otters, snakes, and whatever other creatures nature pushes across my lenses.
In the South, a bird means a quail; a mess of birds, a bunch of quail; and a bird dog, a quail dog. To confuse the issue slightly, in some regions, while black bass are thought of as trout, bobwhites are referred to as partridge. However, regardless of colloquial designation, the history of the bobwhite quail is also the history of the men and women who shaped this continent, a broad spectrum of social, historical, and economic personalities, from the Creek Indians who snared quail to the market hunters who netted them, the sharecroppers who ground-sluiced them, the farmers, doctors, and schoolteachers who hunted up and down miles of multiflora fence rows, flushed bobwhites across bean fields, and killed them on the edge of the broom sedge, to the Yankees who, to this day, wear fancy clothes and chase after quail sitting high in the saddle of expensive gaited horses.
A covey of quail is a coterie, an assembly of coquettes and dandies. Eight to ten inches tall, ovate in shape, balanced on overly long toes, scaly legs, and fat thighs, they assume an impeccably upright posture, particularly when perched on logs and fence posts. These are birds that display a vocabulary of fall colors with lively black eyes and strong, horny beaks designed to deal with stubborn seeds. But in hand they feel like soft-boiled eggs, brown, buff, ash, black, and chestnut-colored eggs whose barred and crescent patterns remind one of swollen leaves on the bottom of a pond. Bobwhite quail are plump and malleable like cotton candy. Tender birds without the musculature of distant travelers or even roamers, quail gravitate to where the food is plentiful and within walking distance; they enjoy both grit and chatter and are loath to fly for any reason. The male bird wears a white mask over his cheeks and chin and black eye stripes down to his beak. The female’s coloring matches her mate’s—a similarity of plumage usually indicates an inclination to sharing of parental duties—except that the hen’s mask is ochre yellow in coloring. The entire covey faces its destiny with poised terror.
The fact that I devote a certain effort to the well-being of bobwhites during these times of political perjury, fast food, and baboonlike talk shows falls on understanding ears in this part of the country; ears that have been conditioned to the hubristic sounds of spring whistling, the startled scatterings of roadside coveys, the resonance of autumn guns, and the invigorating cracklings of fried quail and okra. So when I am asked what kind of a farm I own I say, “A bird farm,” readily admitting to being, by modern criteria, a bum. However, instead of being questioned about my motives or the rationale behind them, I am queried on the condition of the land, the dogs, and that year’s crop of quail. The questions entertain well-hidden remembrances, reminders of gentler days when slow dancing, drive-in movies, spandex girdles, and Golden Hawk Studebakers were fashionable.
When I am asked the same question up north, I reply, “A big farm.”
“Oh! You mean an everything farm?” he or she asks, backpedaling for all it’s worth in an effort to forestall any thought I may have regarding honking on about rural life, mud holes, and chiggers.
“Yeah,” I answer, looking the asker in the eye. And much to everyone’s relief, that’s usually the end of it.
For reasons of life, death, and changing interests, the farm had not been managed for quail for fifteen years prior to my arrival. Deer were culled from tree stands and doves were shot in the cornfields, but for a long time there was only one serious quail hunter: a fine old Southern gentleman whose family name is that of a famous American shotgun, a friend of the family who ran his pointers three or four times a season as much for the exercise it offered his dogs as for the memories; treasured memories of the quick, full, busy years of youth when turning over twenty coveys of quail in a day’s hunting meant little more than a comfortable number of birds to drink to at sundown.
To the best of my knowledge there were but seven coveys of quail living on the farm when I bought it; a year later there were fifteen; the following winter twenty-one; and now, as I write, I have counted and marked twenty-five coveys on the map. My original plan was to raise the number of bobwhite quail to saturation point, partly as an exercise in management, partly because it stimulates my dogs’ raison d’être, and partly because I was cocksure that by increasing the population I would be doing the birds a favor. Now that I have settled on the land and lived through a progression of seasons, I better understand the pace and guidelines nature has set for herself on this particular piece of dirt, guidelines that encourage certain endeavors and discourage others. I can improve the habitat by removing or adding to what is already here, but there is nothing that I, or for that matter any man, can do, to impress nature. By saturating the farm with bob-white quail what I really had in mind was impressing myself and my friends.
On the other hand, I am going to shape this small corner of nature into a vision of what I believe will best glorify its inherent qualities, a sculpturing of the land—heresy to some who would leave nature to her own devices—gardening on a large scale, subjective landscaping for beauty’s sake. And, as I like to see as far as my eyes allow, I remove what is diseased, repetitious, or ugly: catfaced, topless, rachitic, stunted, and otherwise suppressed trees that compete with specimens that would otherwise grow strong and relatively straight. To offset this inclination to prune, I plant five times as many trees as I remove, so that one day, unless I go broke in the process, no matter where I stand I will see only what pleases me. When I want ugly I’ll drive into town.
In conjunction with this bit of gardening insanity, I do everything short of killing hawks, bobcats, and coyotes (I do set live traps for the nest destroyers such as opossums, raccoons, and skunks) to provide Colinus virginianus, visiting turkeys, and the local deer herd with a comfortable place to live. I realize that the culling of predators is subjective, but culling is an everyday aspect of farm life. In every other respect I do my best to offer free bed and board to those animals or birds that migrate to or take up residence on this land.
In the fall and winter I kill a small percentage of my tenants and eat them. Those I don’t eat I give to others who do. Nothing is wasted except the money and time it takes to run the operation, and it might be argued that neither is wasted. In my life I have polluted and abused nature and thousands of her residents, and despite this questionable behavior nature has granted me a life of pleasure and unqualified beauty. Now that I have the wherewithal to manage and tend to this farm and the species that live on it, it would be a moral insult not to do so. The more food and cover I plant the more game and nongame species will thrive, the more water holes, the more fish, the more wildlife, the more predators. Small as it may be, I will make this sequestered world of mine revolve with the assurance of time.
Francis Thompson, an English poet, wrote that one could not pick a flower without troubling a star. To be protective of things because they happen to live here is a new experience, one that I am trying to sort out. So far, owning land has made me aware of nature’s ingrained patience, of weather and its reign over every action and conversation, of the feel of steel disks cutting new ground, of the stretching noises of growing corn on a warm summer night, of the weight that monotony bears on those who work the earth, of how the simplicity of rural life is unnecessarily complicated to give it weight and importance, and of how grateful I am to have such a canvas on which to create whatever pleases me; a cocoon inside which I live and love and fight my demons. I keep my contact with the outside world to a minimum and my address book thin; my wife, meanwhile, has joined the contemplative order of the Carmelites. Should I wonder why?
So the farmer in me grows an annual crop of wild flying delicacies and the hunter in me harvests a percentage of this fruitage; the businessman in me recognizes a losing proposition and the child in me doesn’t give a shit. A long time ago, a hunter said, “Doubtless the good Lord could have made a better game bird than bobwhite, and better country to hunt him in than our Southern States, but equally doubtless he never did.” Any other lingering doubts as to the simplistic nature of my endeavors need only be addressed to my dogs.