The green smell of July in Tallahassee serves as a reminder to those in wildlife management that green smells aren’t finite and that the end of the planting season for bobwhites (and every other grain-eating species) is at hand. Crops such as corn and Egyptian wheat are already in the ground and in normal years will produce hard seeds through the first half of January; in wet years that same grain will sour before Christmas. The longest-lasting and most reliable crop I use is Sorghum NK 300 (another nonnative plant shipped from Africa), planted the second week of July—about as late as we dare stretch it in northern Florida without running into an early freeze. We plant long strips (two hundred by fifteen feet) next to the plum trees and parallel to the planted pines and bicolored Lespedeza, offering an intense diversity of cover, food, and edges according to the formula of food adjoining escape cover equals minimum exposure to predation. The worst thing I can do for my tenants is to grow small, isolated food plots, which will in no time be known as accipiter corner, a quail-McNugget repository for raptors, a death row for bobwhite quail. Bill throws an occasional ninety-degree turn in the food patches and plants in long, lazy curves, which mathematically promote edges. It takes eight pounds of sorghum per plot, which we fertilize two weeks later and let the sun do the rest.
It was common a few years ago to partially cut the trunk of oak trees until they lay on the ground, leaving a section of the trunk connected so that the sap would keep flowing to the leaves. The quail felt safe under the fallen branches and the hawks used the nearest tree as a stooping scaffold. In France I once watched a buzzard visit a covey of eleven gray partridge in a twenty-acre alfalfa field every afternoon. Two weeks later it had eaten every single bird. I don’t doubt that, given the same particulars, a Cooper would emulate his European cousin.
Bobwhite quail eat as many as fifty thousand insects a year, reason enough to sow brown-top millet, which attracts all the bugs a quail could wish for. However, as brown-top is expensive, and because the natural propagation of life and natural food in the Southeast is so rich in the summer and fall, I don’t use millet as extensively as some with deeper pockets. Also, when the fledgling bald eagles scream down from inside their nests at my bird dogs and the frost and rain have beaten the life out of the natural food and cover—in other words, when help is really needed—the brown-top has long since passed.
The actual numbers of food plots and additional cover can be broken down into a series of equations that take into account the resolve of the owner and the weight of his wallet. I plant forty strips of sorghum, half a dozen one-acre cornfields, two big cornfields used as dove fields, and three one-acre plots in the woods, on which I experiment with either Kobe Lespedeza or Egyptian wheat and this year buckwheat—I would like to find a grain with which to replace corn, but so far haven’t found one.
The list of commercial quail food is long and keeps growing longer every year. Most of it is designer bird food. Expensive and wasteful, the motto of our time. Corn, sorghum, soybeans, and brown-top millet can handle 90 percent of any additional food needs a bobwhite could have. I go overboard on food because I like food, and because I am a glutton I feed tens of thousands of nongame birds with the vigor I feed my human friends. Last year my quail were so fat they self-basted under the duress of applied heat.
One day I will try alternating crops, such as planting winter wheat, Egyptian wheat, and buckwheat all in the same year, as sort of a wheat festival. My ultimate objective is to abandon all annual crops and rely on the perennial plants such as partridge peas, protective cover that has already been planted, rotation burns, and extensive spring disking to carry a natural quail population. I am interested to see how the birds will react and what it will do to the population. But for now I enjoy watching the corn and sorghum dry and grow old and tawny in time with the broom sedge and gum trees. A matter of taste.